Basecamp is a popular project management tool provider that switched to the cloud in 2008. Last year, it moved back.
Why? Because with project management workloads, there are only a particular number of tasks humans can accomplish at a time - nobody can complete ten million tasks at once.
Moreover, people can only fulfill those at the speed of a human, not a machine.
As such, businesses only require relatively static processing power to support their project management endeavors. Thus, the cloud is often unnecessary.
Recognizing this, Basecamp decided that the high costs of paying for the cloud didn’t match up to its customer needs and reverted back.
As a result, they could achieve much more reasonable costs and appropriate their business model by embracing private hosting.
Yet, this trend extends beyond the boundaries of project management, as humans still do most of the work that a business accomplishes.
Is the Cloud Necessary for Static Workloads?
Pushing past the confines of project management, consider everything that goes into an ERP solution: these are predominantly static workloads.
Now, think about the ERP solutions of leaders such as Oracle or SAP. While these tech pioneers are broadening their portfolios, the processing power required to handle the workloads within their ERP solutions has not significantly changed.
Taking this principle further, consider other business systems that mostly require human inputs and outputs. It is often best to question the cost-efficiency of moving these to the cloud.
As Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder of babelforce, tells us:
“If I were to make a decision about moving a solution to the cloud, with my management head on, I’d ask: tell me about these workloads. How often do they happen? Do humans have to do them? That would be in my first set of questions.”
Nevertheless, most technology is best placed in the cloud in particular environments. A contact center is perhaps the best example of this.
The Cloud Delivers Value In Dynamic Environments Like the Contact Center
With incredible fluctuations in demand and AI beginning to come to the fore, the cloud is much more beneficial in the contact center.
Recognizing this, Buckley states:
“You will likely need auto-scaling to handle peaks and auto-recovery because if something goes wrong, you just can’t afford not to be back and running with an alternative version of the service within seconds.”
As a vendor of cloud contact center solutions, it is no surprise that Buckley champions CCaaS. Yet, he likes to discuss the shortcomings of cloud technology instead of following the hype cycle.
In doing so, operation leaders can support the CFO in understanding why a rental SaaS model may drive more value in the contact center than elsewhere in an organization.
After all, the cloud is not always a cost-effective endeavor.
