Access Versus Ownership: The Critical Battle For Business Information

By frankpierson

I pay $9.99 a month for Spotify and I don't own 95% of the music I listen to on there. But I carry that music with me on my iPhone, iPad and whatever computer I'm currently logged into. Does it matter that I don't have a hard disk or the digital rights management to sync the file to my iPod when I still have access to the music 95% of the places I go?

This question isn't just one for personal entertainment; it's a vital showdown taking place in Information Technology departments around the world. Companies like salesforce.com are convincing their customers to move their data, application development, user access and indeed whole business processes into The Cloud, where hardware and software are no longer line items to budgeted for and maintained. This is taking place right now from multi-thousand user Financial Services companies to two person private companies. Server hardware and maintenance is going the way of The Confederacy as is proprietary client-server software packages that are expensive to deploy and ridiculous drains of resources to enhance.

I recently worked on a team of ten or so people that managed a Salesforce organization of 8,000 users. Go find me an IT department that can do that with on premise client-server technology. 

The battles being fought right now in Information services are centered around access to data and digital products versus their physical ownership. If a company sides with the latter, it is going to cost them triple and take three times as long to keep up with than their competitor who chooses the former.

The needs of today should've been met yesterday and the needs for tomorrow should be working right now. Where is your company?

Joshua Minton is a salesforce.com Certified Sales & Service Cloud Consultant, Advanced Administrator and Developer. He works for The Revolution Group in Columbus Ohio.