Seeing over the horizon

Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Latest News Reveals Business Risks in Cloud

The latest estimates show that the world market for Cloud infrastructure has grown by almost 20% in the last year, to $66.5bn in Q1 2023, and that’s 60% higher than two years ago. AWS is very much the leader with its Cloud revenues estimated at well over $25bn. All the leading hyperscalers have grown significantly…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Cloud gives tech firms a skills shortage

It’s almost twenty years since AWS publicly launched its first infrastructure service. Those early days of Cloud were chock full of promise: no more hardware ownership to worry about; scale infrastructure up and scale down, paying only for what you use. In many ways that headline promise has been realised. Much of the last two…
Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Three ways Cloud may be holding back your Business Plan

Cloud has become embedded in many firms as the weapon of choice for accessing computing power and storage without needing to own hardware. However, while Cloud has many advantages, there are some important disadvantages that business decision makers must navigate. Sometimes, the underlying disadvantages of Cloud can be overlooked and only become apparent when real…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why we can’t ask ChatGPT if it’s the future of technology

I’ve often wondered whether insight is simply a particular kind of logic. Did Steve Jobs visualise the visionary Walkman by joining the dots and seeing an area where plenty of human activity took place yet recorded sound was missing? Was the iPhone an obvious step to take five years after Blackberry had proven the appetite…
Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why Operational people dominate the new Cloud era

Cloud technology has captured the headlines for years, and development teams have delighted in all the new services and capabilities that have been added. Rightly so. The race has been on to build new applications and get them running in the Cloud. Yet the emphasis has been shifting steadily, largely overlooked, and this shift has…
Executing, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Why using a new Cloud provider is getting even harder

Public Cloud services are widely available, and more and more firms are using these as a platform for their own technology services and systems. Tech teams, though, tend to have a favourite brand of Cloud, often out of familiarity or practicality. This can be a problem because there are several good, business reasons why firms…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Are you ready for the Post Everything world?

How the world has changed in such a short space of time. Just three years ago, Trump was in the White House, Jeremy Corbin was almost in Downing Street, and Get Brexit Done was everywhere in the UK media.  It’s hard to think of a major business assumption that hasn’t been turned upside down since…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy

Why tech firms must now be agile in business, too

The future isn’t going to be like the past. In fact it isn’t even going to be like the present, but that’s not new for tech firms. What is new is that there are so many moving parts and large, disparate and sudden uncertainties out there that make forecasting deeply suspect. The range of significant…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management

Why change reveals the entrepreneurs

Paco and his family have run the cafe just off the beach here in Southern Spain for 35yrs, and it’s well known and frequented by locals, ex-pats and knowledgeable tourists alike. The Mollette Catalan are as popular as beans, bacon and eggs. Yet Paco is cutting his opening hours and telling us that he’s thinking…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Business leaders need to know where Cloud is heading

I read somewhere that business is all about solving problems before someone else solves them for you. Certainly “Hope and Cope” is not a management strategy that has much going for it. Anticipation is everything, especially for business leaders in fast moving sectors like technology where it’s like driving at high speed. To correct a…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Netflix shows us that Cloud is a jungle

Good entrepreneurs and great salespeople share a key characteristic: at heart they are control freaks. In some it may all be fairly benign, carefully moderated and directed to get good things to happen, but control is what drives them. Michael Porter’s Five Forces is a well established device that’s used by market strategists to analyse…
Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why the Cloud carve-up makes life hard for SMEs

Revealing figures published recently in the FT show Cloud supply is highly concentrated in AWS and Azure, and they now command more than half the worldwide revenues in the sector. The rest of the vendors are fragmented and too dispersed for them to be able to exert any significant influence. They pick up what’s left….