A few months back I attended BusinessCloud9, a really excellent event run by my old mate Stuart Lauchlan, looking at cloud-based business applications. It was the least dorky Cloud show I have been to by some margin- the room was chockful of suits, with budgets.
Anyway – one story really stuck with me… because it utterly nails the benefits of the Cloud model for business applications.
Zack Nelson, CEO of Netsuite summed up the value of the model: Value Added Tax or VAT.
During the teeth of the financial crisis the UK government cut VAT by 2.5% to stimulate businesses. For companies running traditional on premise business applications this was a total nightmare. Didn’t matter whether you were a small business running Sage or a FTSE100 firm running Oracle Financials this was a painful change to make. Retailers were in a tough spot. How were they supposed to make all their systems compliant with the rule change.
Unless, that is, they were using hosted Software as a Service (Saas) applications. With the cloud, a change like this can be rolled out to every customer overnight- as easily as Google rolling out a new service.
So next time someone asks what’s the Business Value of cloud you can just say read my lips – Some. New. Taxes.
monkchips says:
April 15, 2010 at 5:34 pm
James Governor’s Monkchips » VAT: How To Explain The Value of The Cloud To Business People http://monk.ly/c1RySz
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
dahowlett says:
April 15, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Look carefully at the shopping list @monkchips post. http://is.gd/buexF < star item at lower rate of VAT
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Neil Bartlett says:
April 15, 2010 at 6:35 pm
I see broccoli, but no ice cream. Where’s the ice cream?!?
Also… Horlicks AND Durex Extra Safe? Isn’t that a bit like belt AND braces?
soafaq says:
April 15, 2010 at 7:39 pm
James Governor’s Monkchips » VAT: How To Explain The Value of The Cloud To Business People http://monk.ly/c1RySz RT @monkchips
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
LinuxScribe says:
April 16, 2010 at 4:55 pm
@monkchips delivers powerful, simple example of how cloud rocks. http://bit.ly/9yT5Ru
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Tax Example Explains the Value of Hosted Software to Business | Future Changes says:
May 14, 2010 at 8:24 pm
[…] Governor recounts an example used by Zack Nelson, CEO of NetSuite, to demonstrate how hosted business software (aka Cloud Computing or Software as a Service/SaaS) helps companies adapt to fast-changing rules […]
Dreamforce 2011: Salesforce Forces its Way Onto The Top Table, Gets Big to Win Ugly says:
September 6, 2011 at 6:13 pm
[…] manage – Cloud and SaaS models can mitigate a great deal of this. Thus for example – how about rolling out changes to Value Added Taxation across an entire retail company in one day? What is more No Software has clearly worked fantastically well as a slogan for Marc Benioff and […]
Windows Azure and Cloud Computing Posts for 9/6/2011+ - Windows Azure Blog says:
September 6, 2011 at 8:12 pm
[…] manage – Cloud and SaaS models can mitigate a great deal of this. Thus for example – how about rolling out changes to Value Added Taxation across an entire retail company in one day? What is more No Software has clearly worked fantastically well as a slogan for Marc Benioff and […]