A few hundred years ago, Adam Smith's panegyrics on the "Invisible Hand" in his book "A Wealth of Nations" became the foundation of capitalist theory and helped form business as we know it today. Now cloud theory, especially "Ra-In Clouds," – short for "Rapid Innovation” – is the new way of looking at capital investments.
Cordys, a leader of business process management (BPM) software whose mission is to improve customers' business operations with world-class, process oriented software, recently issued a white paper titled “The Process Factory Imperative” which details the many benefits of cloud-based services.
Since the dawn of the Information Age, business has struggled to catch up with the latest technological innovations in order to become more efficient and to get a better edge in the marketplace. Since changes in technology can often happen in quantum leaps as well as gradually, business theory has varied concerning capital investments into technology –whether they should be large-scaled and less frequent or minimal and more frequent. Most companies have had to find their own middle road in order to optimize BPM within their organization.
The Cordys platform with next generation BPM software and its cloud technology allows customers to dramatically improve the speed of change and reduce cost, vitally altering the way they innovate their business operations.
As discussed in Cordys’ recent white paper, cloud theory involves the discussion of technology in the workplace as a collection of applications and services rather than inventories of hardware. Comparisons to the Internet and the way in which processing centers are managed (or mismanaged) leads us to realize that businesses do not need to own every stage of the hardware and processing involved in BPM to minimize overhead; the constantly changing nature of technology as well as the shared networks and servers are actually much more affordable when viewed as pay-as-you-go or pay-as-you-grow.
“There will be many ways in which the cloud will change businesses and the economy, most of them hard to predict, but one theme is already emerging,” states the Cordys’ white paper. “In the current economic environment businesses will have to become more like the technology itself; more adaptable, more interwoven and more specialized.”
Flexible and scalable IT services without any software deployment and maintenance on a pay-as-you-go basis will lower the cost dramatically. The Cordys platform with its combined BPM and cloud technology allows organizations to be flexible and to optimize their business processes while lowering the cost of IT.
Many business managers and leaders are reluctant to use such middle-man services because they were once considered cuts into potential profits, but now it is considered best practice in terms of risk management because you are no longer investing large amounts of capital upfront with an unclear ROI; monthly or yearly evaluations of these Software-as-Service applications can lead to changes in providers to cut costs and optimize BPM. Similarly, the ability to switch service providers keeps the overhead low due to competition.
Essentially, you are no longer constrained by investments into what will quickly become legacy hardware or firmware and concerns about technology being future-proof are obviated since you can change providers with relative ease and not risk losing invested capital in the form of business machines or other forms of tangible technology.
Ra-In' Clouds are examples where businesses save money not because technology has helped them to innovate themselves or within their corporate structure, but changes in the marketplace and technology in general allow for a quicker customization of services since technology is now on-demand allowing for continuous and flexible improvements in BPM as our business landscape changes.
Cordys plays an integral role by providing a space for businesses users and developers to build new applications from scratch utilizing services already in the cloud.
“These applications are ideal for process centric deployment in the cloud,” according to Cordys.
They are not turbulence so much as tailwinds that will help your business thrive. Now you can enjoy "rain" as much as a Transcendentalist and reap even greater profits.
Michelle Amodio is a TMCnet contributor. She has helped promote companies and groups in all industries, from technology to banking to professional roller derby. She holds a bachelor's degree in Writing from Endicott College and currently works in marketing, journalism, and public relations as a freelancer.Edited by Carrie Schmelkin