Productivity in the Cloud - A Practical Example

I have blogged previously on cloud computing and its benefits. Consequently I thought it would be worth sharing a real world example of its benefits.

I work for Deloitte in Ireland where I am a director in our technology consulting practice. Recently we have been undertaking more and more projects for clients based on software as a service. One project in particular serves as a great example of how much more efficient software development in the cloud is to more traditional methods. The goal of the project was to automate a sales and fulfilment process for a major commercial client and thus significantly reduce the time it took to both take and fulfil a customer order. Some of the members of the current team had built a key part of the existing solution over 10 years ago. At the time the design phase alone of that project took somewhere between 3 and 4 months. Using a SaaS based solution combined with agile techniques we managed to build and deploy into production the new solution in just over 10 weeks and that included functionality (such as mobile) not available in the current solution and was undertaken by a smaller team. This is a truly huge saving in IT time and effort, let alone the time to market gains made by the client. Internally we have reflected on what a win this is for our client and ultimately for us but you can't help but ponder on what this ultimately means for the systems integration business model.