Because the rules of the game have changed and IT budgeting is becoming more variable, just like a mobile phone bill a few years ago. After a stabilisation phase, you could say roughly what you would have to pay per month because you knew your own usage behaviour. Especially in younger years, when money was tight or you wanted to buy something expensive, you might have written a few fewer text messages or used the landline to optimise your costs. It's no different in the cloud and who knows, the first flat rates for the B2B cloud may soon be available.
Rethinking is therefore another success factor on the road to the cloud. I'm always amazed at the discussions I get involved in when I present Dynamic Database to customers: How many want to philosophise with me about the hardware and its performance and how many want to discuss the included licence package. How they then explain to me that they don't need certain licence options that are offered with the service and whether these can be excluded to achieve a lower price. However, the fact that they have been over-licensed for years due to oversized hardware and that Dynamic Database would enable them to get rid of their high investments and capital commitment immediately seems out of the question for many in the first conversation. Presumably because many are still operating in their old ways of thinking and simply want to minimise the price and are looking for potential by trying to eliminate services that are irrelevant to them. But it is precisely because of this individualisation that IT providers have struggled in the past to keep their cost structures under control and make interesting offers to customers.
To summarise:
If you want to be successful on the Journey to the Cloud, you have to clearly show your employees the associated goals, turn employees into stakeholders, show them perspectives and throw old thought patterns overboard. Above all, you have to be prepared to purchase a standardised service where you cannot have a say in every detail of how it is produced, but can of course always make demands on performance in terms of service levels.
We are currently in a learning phase in which precisely this rethink is taking place. Here is a nice statement from a customer that I heard a few weeks ago: "We would like to use your standard service, but we only want 15 days, not 31 days of backup and with the XS offer we don't need 16 GB RAM, 8 GB is enough. How does this affect the prices?" 🙂
With this in mind, let's get ready for the Journey to the Cloud.