Beware the “As a Servitude” Economy: Cloud Rollouts Suck Up a Lot More Resources Than You Think

Lest the world think, as they may, that HfS is an unalloyed booster of the As-a-Service Economy, we offer a caution for your consideration. Breathless as some have been regarding the imminent end to outsourcing as we know it, to be replaced by cloud apps, robots, and self-regulating analytics, we retain the analyst’s wary eye. 

The patron saint of HfS, Stephen Hawking (see HfS European Buyers Summit, March 2016, Harvey Court, Gonville and Caius), famously observed that even a black hole emits radiation – so we are cautious when our radar registers “something out there,” knowing it could turn out to be a star, or . . . a black hole.

Here’s the fear. Corporate buyers so desperately need and want there to be “a better way” (easy to connect to, easy to pay for, easy to switch from) that they may be prone to run, not walk, to the nearest cloud solution, thus enabling them to be “freed up to concentrate on their core competencies” as the horribly trite phrase goes. Beam us up, Scotty…