1. CURRENT SITUATION
Introduction of the Cloud removed any constrains
in scaling infrastructures for SME companies. Nowadays PaaS and SaaS kind of
services became a reality and in many cases it’s a practical and only way to extend business operations without
substantial investments in expensive hard- and software.
The nature of software packages evolved to
accommodate new runtime environments. Instead of keeping heavy software
packages on individual platforms, their compute power is moved to horizontally
scalable Cloud servers and their functionality is handled remotely via nice and
intuitively understandable GUIs easily accessible from any stationary or mobile
device. Modernised and newly created products from Microsoft, Adobe and Google are
good examples.
Current technology trends are not industrially
finalised yet and keep changing traditional approaches. For the purpose of this
message, we could highlight three current distinctive practices:
-
Vendors deliver functionality
in a modularised manner, when a consumer can pick up only useful services and
pay accordingly,
-
Modularised functionality could
be easily extended via well defined APIs that are progressively becoming
standard part of such services, and
-
Deployment of customised
environments with all selected modules (or services) could be up to 100%
automated.
In regards to technical support and maintenance,
consumer market has changed as well. Customers try to avoid unnecessary
expenses for keeping in-house IT departments and started looking for available
services (or service providers) elsewhere. Such demand created a new market for
taking services from one or more vendors, combining them into bundles and
selling them to right buyers.
2. IDEA
Given that, on the one hand, the market is getting
saturated with new cloud-based modularised soft- and hard-ware services
empowered by standardised APIs and, on the other hand, consumers look for
customisable solutions, it could be a perfect time to build a business that
connects one with another.
Such ‘connection’ could be done by
creation of reusable scripts (or programs) that would automatically deploy a
whole environment for an individual or a group of customers. Such environments
should include build-in plug-ins for handling customer-to-Telco and Telco-to-vendor billing.
Scripts could be archived in a Library that
would naturally grow covering more and more use cases. The Library would become
company ‘know-how’ and its value could
be measured by the number of use cases it handles.
3. POSSIBLE SOLUTION
a.
Allocate Cloud servers.
b.
Find vendors of modularised and
API-enabled PaaSes and SaaSes.
c.
Create a team to build scripts
for automated deployments.
d.
Organise development from
epicentre out in agile manner covering more and more functionality within each
cycle:
a.
Collect consumer requirements
and find most popular scenarios (use cases).
b.
Build and test scripts to meet
business requirements in current cycle.
c.
Deploy new environments and
allocate some resources for their initial maintenance.
d.
Move scripts to the Library and
repeat (d).
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