Two's Company, Three's A Cloud

This was a subhead title for the final section of a recent broadsheet piece on banking. Specifically, that they're all now moving everything they can to the cloud. The last piece being the race to place all back-office infrastructure there.

Well done. Only taken twenty years.

In many ways this reminded me of when I first pitched my own cloud system into corporates.

As the Millennium dawned, the term then was ASP. Pronounced as three initials, rather than Cleopatra's fatal snake. It chimed nicely with the alternative. Itself barely a decade-old 'enemy'. A now old way of doing things; ISV.

Application Service Provision was the future loud and raucous. Independent Software Vendor was the tired and backwards past.

As an interesting aside, the 'disruptor' in more than one sense brought together the good and wiped the bad from those of both ISV and its earlier bested beast, mainframes.

The new way released all manner of attractions. Chief among them, no need for installations, updates, backups or any 'management' drain at all of users and their IT departments.

Yet objectors all too often held sway in classic 'never adopter' mode.

I persevered back then. Finding the vaunted, intrigued, decisive early adopters. Who all began to outpace their competition through my help.

I mention this as for many of these corporates, mine was their first dip into what later got termed On-Demand, and we now call the world of SaaS. Or simply, apps.

That it was in the traditional tech Cinderella outpost of Sales made it all the more delicious.

Who today runs their funnel on a desktop program? Even if you use a spreadsheet for your own parallel or shadow reporting, it's almost bound to be saved online.

I feel that where the banks are catching up, salesteams that win out are about to follow.

The trio referred to in the subhead cited above, are the pair of initial dominant players in Finance cloudage, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, alongside newer entrant, Google Cloud Platform.

It's the third to the party causing the tipping point.

Perhaps similar to video meeting platforms. In that the first out-the-blocks was Zoom. Then, due to demonic distribution control, MS Teams swept to a late lead. Yet one that is not set in stone. For I believe the third wave is about to hit.

Which is in the form of emergent niche focus. Primed to eat away at established share. The reason for their success will be that they are inherently designed solely for their super-lasered segment subset. Something Teams will never be.

As with all diffusion of tech, there will be a vast majority that stick with what they know. Or in this case, being force-fed.

Yet true glory comes to those who break the mould.

In a fashion, mimicking how no-one ever went back to floppy discs once they used the cloud.

Now video calls work, why on earth would any salesperson go back to a combo of only phone, mail or meeting in-person?

If so, the asteroid would then be hurtling your way.

Likely if you're using Teams, and definitely if you are not using video calls with precision to be a distinctive part of your selling, you are then set to meet the fate of other business tech dinosaurs down the years.