BPM-EAI

Lets forget the Cloud jargon for a moment and step back a little and examine what has been happening till today.  A Typical SI providing services in BPM-EAI-B2B space will typically utilize the industry acclaimed range of products to meet the clients integration needs.

The typical lifecycle of package implementation will consist of,

• Requirements : Gathering and Analyzing,
• Architecture : Logical and Physical Architecture,
• Design : Functional and Technical Design. 
• Installation : Install the package on the defined hardware,
• Configuration : Configure the package based on the design,
• Customization : Customize the package as per the design,
• Build (if needed) : To build any additional capability by custom application development (may be rare but possible),
• Test and Deploy : Test and deploy the package for the consumption

• On Premise (Dedicated) : Completely owned by client deployed in Client's premises.
• Shared : Owned by the SI and is shared with other clients of the Service provider in secure way.
• Private : Owned by the SI but is dedicated to the client and not shared with others

Now lets examine the cloud scenario,

There is no major change in the lifecycle of the package implementation.

There is a change in the infrastructure on which the implementation will be done, There will be an additional scenario of deployment on the cloud, but the important thing to note is the implementation stages doesn't change. It is still going to be the IP address of the machines provided on which the implementation will be made. It doesn't matter to the SI as to whether the IP addresses are physical machines or virtual machines. Of course the configuration of the package might change slightly to use the cloud capability of the package and ensure the security of transactions have been taken care of.

By the look of it the Majority of the changes seems to be the following organization

1. Cloud Service Provider : Majorly provides Infrastructure services. They will need new mechanisms to optimize the usage of hardware resources including commissioning and decommissioning of the software depending on the service contract and release the processing power for optimized usage. This is to ensure they can reap maximum benefits from their cloud infrastructure and so can their client.
2. Package Software Product companies : These will need to align their products to actually operate on the cloud and maintain the state during commissioning and decommissioning by the cloud provider and deployment capabilities on cloud.
3. Organisation providing the virtualization software: They will need to be able to provide new and innovative features to increase the Cloud capability. We can call these products to create a "Soft Slice" of the existing hardware.
4. Hardware Product companies: The Future will dictate the Hardware Product companies to provide inbuilt hardware optimization techniques. This can be called as "Hard slice". This is more like a inbuilt master RAID Controller in hardware.

A SI is normally engaged to configure a product on hardware and provide a solution that meets the business requirement of the organization. This part of the business may not have a major impact especially where the SI is involved in the package implementation as the expectation is the package and hardware utilized will eventually be cloud compliant.

Hence I am of the opinion that the SI who provides the package implementation services will not be majorly impacted by the Cloud Computing. Would like to hear what you all have to say though.

Having said that the SI can utilize the Cloud capability of both infrastructure and packages to introduce new service offerings which will enable them to run managed services environment for a particular industry problem and thus start a new revenue stream. Though such a concept existed before with the cloud strategy the cost of providing the service and price of the service both can be optimized and will be on demand.

This address the one major problem for SI, the dilemma of "whether to invest on an industry solution before an opportunity or after an opportunity". The SI do not prefer to make huge investment for building industry solutions before an opportunity is on table and the opportunity do not want to buy a solution from SI before they have the entire solution on table. This is deadlock that can be resolved by making small investments on solutions and deploying them on cloud and increase the capacity based on the opportunity.

Please do let me know your thoughts.