What’s Your On-Demand Strategy?

Clients used to ask, “What’s on-demand, and why would I do it?”. Now they ask, “I’m hearing on-demand is a great alternative, why wouldn’t I do it?” We’re starting to reach a tipping point, and CIOs are now asked, “what is our on-demand strategy?”

The issues clients initially become concerned about are security and data, dependence on a third party, and integration with other systems. For most emerging biotechs, the security concerns melt away when they look at their own current security versus that of any of the likely on-demand solutions and see that the provider’s security is far superior to their own. Most on-demand providers today acknowledge that the client owns the data, and will even provide a “data escrow” facility, if the client wants to go that far.

With respect to dependence on a third party, these concerns also subside when the client examines the uptime records and service level agreements offered today. The fact is, most emerging biotechs adopted outsourcing long ago and dependence on a third party is nothing new.

Lastly, integration with other systems also turns out to be at worst no different than on-premises solutions. However, with a thoughtful IT strategy and roadmap in place, and the growth of solution footprints to include entire business processes, the need for extensive cross system integration has not developed.

On the other hand, what has developed with on-demand solutions is significant savings in capital outlays and cost of ownership. Through recent system selection work with clients, we’ve seen on-demand solutions consistently come in 25-30% less than the on-premises equivalent. In addition, total cost of ownership models reveal similar savings when all the internal costs (e.g. additional staff, training, upgrades, maintenance, and hardware) are considered. Clients are beginning to see they can get state-of-the-art applications (that stay state-of-the-art) for significantly less, and avoid all the hassle of building an internal IT organization and infrastructure.

We are approaching the tipping point!

One more thing, on-demand gets IT professionals out of the “wires and pliers” business of constantly having the important contribution they can make interrupted by the urgent fire drills of running the network and the applications. This will allow them to finally focus on utilizing the right IT systems to meet the company’s business goals and objectives. This is good news!