The worst of the downturn may be behind us, but its lessons remain clear. For businesses to survive and thrive, they must be able to make better decisions quickly, focus on core strengths and responsibilities, and reduce costs wherever possible. Cloud computing solutions provide a fiscally responsible, productivity-positive meansway to deliver on these goals, eliminating waste and needless expense while strengthening the processes which make your company competitive and successful.
So many of the financial adventures and failures of recent years ended with the famous last words: “if only we had known sooner.” Information must be both timely and accessible in order to provide value. Too many businesses flounder because their enterprise systems fail on both counts. And because the cloud offers benefits that cannot be found in on-premise systems, real-time course corrections are possible. Dashboards, such as those found in NetSuite, can be easily constructed with up-to-the-minute information for any business user in any role, and deeper analytical reports are based on today’s knowledge — not last month’s stale figures.
In the last two decades, companies of all stripes have stumbled into the information technology business, committing large percentages of their capital and labor budget to the care and feeding of complex software systems with mazes of support servers. For companies to grow, they must produce — not pour money into cost centers that have nothing to do with the core business. For example, NetSuite customer Asahi Kasei Spandex America slashed its IT expenditures from three percent of revenue to just 0.1 percent of revenue by switching its platform from SAP R/3 to NetSuite.
Cloud computing frees companies of the obligations and hassles of IT management, and puts the onus for hardware maintenance, software development and upgrades, and system security in the hands of a core group of highly-trained, highly-paid specialists. Fully embracing the cloud means being free of the concerns and hassles of IT infrastructure, enabling your company to build on its key differentiators and grow.
Costs matter. Systems integration, particularly among companies with international presence, creates a tremendous drag on profits. Cobbling together data and process flow across numerous systems and databases is an ongoing expense easily avoided in the cloud. Financial executives can see the obvious advantages of the seamless multinational consolidation provided by NetSuite OneWorld, which can deliver transparent currency functionality and a true sense for a company’s up-to-the-minute global performance. Many companies can make the business case for a move to the cloud simply by cutting out middleware license fees. Factoring in gains in reliability and performance, as well as reduced training time thanks to consistent interfaces and the ease-of-use cloud computing solutions are known for make the case even more clear. The cloud can give your company the room and the margin it needs to grow as a business, not as an IT shop.
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