In the column he wrote for this blog a few weeks ago, Laef Olson, CTO of RightNow said “Over the past several years, I’ve seen objection after objection to cloud-based computing crumble in the face of determined innovation. “
Next objection to fall should be mass scalability. Two announcements this week suggest it:
- Siemens has purchased a global enterprise subscription of virtually all of SuccessFactors modules …for its worldwide corporate talent management vision, for 420,000 users across 80 countries in 20 different languages.
- NTT, which is Asia’s largest managed services player, is running a pilot with Zoho and other cloud applications – eventual deployment is aimed at tens of thousands of NTT customers.
The rollouts should take a few years, but organizations like Siemens and NTT are known to kick the tires from several angles before they make major decisions like these. Indeed NTT plans to host the applications in Japan to better monitor the rollout (disclosure: my firm has done work with couple of Siemens divisions but not on the SuccessFactors transaction)
