Hosting 365

Gartner reports (no link, sorry, read it on REAL paper!) that the role of the CIO is to change from being predominantly internal in focus to a more external outlook, challenged with helping company competitiveness and growth.

The report peaked MY interest because it 2 of the technologies it mentions that will be key in 2006 are ‘mobile workforce enablement’ and ‘collaboration technology’. Guess what? They’re both hosted applications, or ones that hosting will play the part of facilitator and infrastructure provider to.

Collaboration can only really be achieved thru on-line applications. The days of the shared network drive are dying (thank goodness!) and hosted applications are providing a variety of functionality (enterprise management, customer relations, logistics - now even desktop applications like email, word processing and project management). Technologies such as blogs and wiki’s allow companies to communicate and share project / product / business information internally or externally. The primary benefit of these is access-anywhere, and edit without local application requirements.

Which leads nicely to the second technology - mobile workforce enablement. The CIO’s role will be to provide the hardware and software to facilitate an increasing mobile workforce. It’s no longer only sales reps and maintenance workers that are out-of-office, teleworking, offices at multiple locations (and outsourced offices or managed services providers located off-site) and just keeping in touch with the office out-of-hours. This means providing services like push-email, portable phone numbers, and access to what were traditionally in-office applications like file servers, CRM and Enterprise software.
On the business side, the report states that one of the key 2006 priorities will be controlling enterprise operating costs. Music to MY ears! The model we take allows CIO’s to procure a high-end cluster of dedicated servers with hosted office applications, disaster recovery options and managed services support (or any customisation of that of course, up or down scale), for a monthly fee that is a fraction of the captial expenditure normally required. That model saves CIO’s both cap-ex costs, and internal staff resources. Hey, of course we make money off it to, it’s the outsourcing business model - providing Internet Infrastrucutre and associated services are OUR core features, not yours, so why try to build it yourself when we’ve invested millions in people and facilities? Just like we don’t try to write our own operating systems for our servers, we’re quite happy to use best-in-breed systems that already exist!

I think hosting companies will move aggressively into this space - building on their data centre infrastructure to provide value-added services and pre-packaged solutions. It’s a win-win for both customers and the hosting company as they have the expertise and facilities to provide the hosted applications CIO’s will need to enable the key drivers of changes mentioned above.