Information technology platforms provide a very powerful medium for birthing innovative business ideas and quickly taking them viral.  Communication technology has matured significantly in recent years, the computing hardware is no longer a bottleneck, and the software industry has matured to collaborate on standards and code repositories that are widely used on diverse platforms and equipment.  The maturity in these areas is just what entrepreneurs need to 'think fast and create faster'.

But without the right infrastructure on which to build these platforms, entrepreneurs would still be held back from quickly responding to business opportunities. That is where Cloud Computing presents an opportunity to entrepreneurs or small/medium organizations to bring innovative IT/IS services to market.  

So why is infrastructure so important to business impact? A decade ago scalability and availability were significant architectural challenges on which architects spent considerable time.  The initial capital cost to set up the infrastructure was high and a lot of time was spent talking with vendors on the availability of the right hardware, software, building redundancy and backups.  This slowed business down and required much larger up-front investment. The Cloud infrastructure, which has been around for a few years, presents a solution that addresses the cost and 'speed to market' issues and get their businesses quick-started.

For example in the early years of Medical transcription business (late 90's) Olive Technology spent time designing a technology solution for a partner to address scalability for secure storage of audio data as the business grew.  Looking back, I think to myself of all the time that could have been better used to design a richer user experience and create broader customer reach (like mobile delivery) rather than addressing the storage scalability issue. Which of these focuses would result in a happier customer for our client? The answer is clear. Olive has worked with several entrepreneurs with remarkable ideas and at the end of the day the success of any of these initiatives lies in the happiness of the customer…not the complexity or customization of the infrastructure we have built. We must focus our IT solutions on what will allow new businesses to succeed quickly rather than on expensive and time-intensive custom approaches that were the norm in past years. . 

Cloud infrastructure in the technology services arena presents clear opportunities to innovate faster ever before, allowing software development service companies to focus their efforts on delivering richer customer experiences through the products we build and higher speed to market by reducing the time spent on scalability and availability.  At Olive Technology we have already started reaping the benefits of Cloud Computing by guiding our clients to utilize the Cloud to quickly bring services to market for their customers.  In the days to come we will be looking at more innovative products and methods to leverage this service for our clients.

Find out how Olive Technology can help you build innovative and quick solutions in the Cloud.