The Cloud: A Transformative Business Model?

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Keith Tilley.

Cloud computing has been touted as an IT game-changer for over 10 years, but it’s only now that businesses have become comfortable enough with the model that we’re starting to see real innovation in the market. Cloud computing has opened up a whole world of possible industry disruptions – allowing start-ups and SMEs to compete successfully with long-established enterprises. For as long as entrepreneurs can re-invent business models the capacity of the cloud will continue to surprise us.

Netflix is often, and deservedly so, cited as one of the best examples of using the cloud to disrupt the industry. While competitors such as Blockbuster and HMV poured time and effort into working out the best way to sell DVDs via the internet, Netflix rewrote the question, asking ‘how can we use the internet to help people watch movies?’…

Although its initial service was built on a traditional datacentre platform with no capacity for scaling up and down, it was the company’s decision to migrate to a public cloud that allowed such rapid growth – allowing Netflix to quickly expand its customer base and scale the business upwards while keeping expenditure to a minimum. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: last year Netflix reported revenues of $4.37bn and added 2.3 million new U.S. subscribers between October and December last year alone…

Read more from the source @ http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/cloud-transformative-business-model-01078631#m3HC50QkeuyApuAt.99