Cloud computing to boost customer-centric services

Changes afoot in aid of the customer and facilitated by cloud mean serious change is needed among suppliers, says Laura Colvine

Over the next five years, IBM believes customers will gain even more control over their interactions with organisations and each other.

Relevance will be key to customer retention, and the more expensive and traditional channels will be marginalised by mobile technologies that promote relationship building.

Organisations will also have to provide consistency as channel distinction will disappear from customers' perspectives, as they will instead be converging around mobile devices. Trust and security will be basic customer requirements.

Our research suggests that within three to five years customers will expect to have access to what they want, when and how they want it, enabled by invisible flexible technology. With cloud, a new breed of customer is dictating a new set of terms, changing the dynamic between buyers and sellers.

Customers who are ready to buy are empowered by cloud – they have more availability and access to information, data and choice than ever before. In addition, cloud customers determine their own usage patterns, opting in and out at their convenience and deciding how much they want to use, when and for how long.

Early service provisioning has already seen customers move towards club clouds. These follow a hybrid or community cloud model.

This happens when the cloud discussion moves beyond technology as a service, infrastructure purchase or IT replacement level to focus on business outcomes and the services required by the end customer.

Customers have a tendency to cluster according to interest or need. Such self-selected clubs not only meet their needs but represent logical groupings based on user, workload, process or data.

Regional club clouds are cloud provisioning for a group of customers in a certain location, such as the city where they are based.

The WUXI iPark Cloud is one example. This rural regeneration cloud offers flexible and shared computing resources for SMBs. It lowers the barriers to market for new companies, local government projects and software start-ups.

Common interest club clouds are where a group of organisations have a common shared service outcome, social need or business requirement. Some want to trade services rather than simply consume them, effectively creating a virtual market or trading place for club members.

Club clouds are driven by the customers' wants, needs or required outcomes such as financial efficiency or regeneration and growth. Club clouds may address cost issues, and also deep-seated concerns about identity, trust and security in virtualised envrionments.

From the outside, this can look rather asymmetric. Traditional sector or industry allegiances between public, private or third sector do not seem to matter as much to customers forming club clouds to meet a pressing, common need.

This customer shift is starting to touch all our markets at IBM, and it is accelerating with the adoption of cloud, social business and mobile technologies. Alongside it comes an increasing democratisation of data, adoption of social computing, increased collaboration between different sectors and organisation types, and much more. In turn, purchasing power devolves to increasingly fragmented customer units.

Suppliers will need greater insight to meet and exceed customer expectation, more brand flexibility to maximise their market presence, and to bring new self-service offerings and services to market much faster.

Many cloud transformations we have been involved with indicate an increased focus on service outcomes and there is growing emphasis on service outcome and the end customer. Cloud-enabled markets, channels and patterns for consumption are reshaping the traditional buyer-supplier market models.

Simply looking at buyer/supplier models or channel strategies will not be enough, though; real change is required. Get refocused on your end customer and consider the business and service outcomes of your cloud provisioning.

Laura Colvine is cloud strategy leader at IBM UK