Larry Walsh over at Channelnomics has a good article based on a Forrester report about how the cloud is changing who and how IT is bought. For a long time it has been known that some minor segment of IT spending was actually spent by non-IT departments. These line of business type of buys are typically in departmental IT or specific project related technology. It can often be related to telephony as well as computing per se. These non-IT department IT acquisitions are sometimes called shadow IT or rogue IT buyers.
But an interesting phenomenon is occurring with the regard to cloud and SaaS purchases. According to the Forrester report, “56 percent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) purchases are driven by groups to meet the specific needs of business processes and operations. Another 49 percent of industry-specific SaaS adoption – such as manufacturing logistics tracking and health care recordkeeping – is driven by business management rather than IT”.
Think about that for a moment, half of SaaS purchases are by non-IT departments. This could have profound implications for how cloud is sold. Maybe investing resources convincing IT departments to give up control of IT resources are resources not well spent.As Larry points out, with the cloud you don’t have the big cap ex on hardware and software licenses that you do in traditional computing environments. This makes cloud based deployments easier to sustain in departmental budgets without having to go through the usual process and procedures that IT departments put tech vendors through.
Does that make it easier for cloud vendors to sell then? The counter-intuitive answer is no. Like the old TV commercial says, “an educated consumer is our best customer”. Dealing with folks who are not IT savvy can present its own issues.
These issues and selling cloud to non-IT folks will have cloud vendors developing new sales techniques and perhaps developing new channels. Just one more way that cloud computing is changing the way the tech industry industry will be doing business.
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