For every consultant who spotted the cloud opportunity and raced to embrace it, there will be another who is still not quite fully convinced.
Clients have spent hundreds of thousands – or even millions – on their on-premise solutions, they are comfortable with their data centres and have established long-term relationships with their maintenance engineers. They’re not ready to give all that up in one go. And, as long they resist a wholesale move to cloud, there’s a role for IT consultants and specialists to offer support for these traditional models.
But the pace of change is quickening; clients have tuned in to piecemeal migration and with software vendor innovation being cloud-focused, the largest traditional consulting firms have seen the writing on the wall, turning to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as the only credible way of rapidly building their cloud capability.
Shaun Fröhlich is UK managing partner of Incredibleresults, and works with leadership teams to accelerate value growth.
“We are all on a spectrum,” he says. “Many believe the world is changing because of the cloud and it is spurring them on to cash in their chips on their existing business, but there is an almost equal number that remain neutral and see it as an evolution, not reason to trigger a capital event.”
Despite the cloud offering faster, less disruptive deployment and easier global enablement – while cyber-security concerns have increasingly been addressed – migration to the cloud isn’t yet wholesale for most organizations.
