Cloud Computing

Sometimes, great ideas just never take off because some prerequisite solution to a problem hasn’t been solved. E-procurement was a great idea in the 1990’s but until the internet was ubiquitous and trusted, it was slow to take off. Looking back, the trust and ubiquity grew quite quickly but in 1996, if we had a crystal ball that said it would take the best part of a decade to become an established way of doing business, I wonder whether we’d have given up. We didn't know that the problem was trust and ubiquity until it was solved.

There remains a lot of gobbledygook talked and written about “Cloud” computing, as anyone who has been around the industry for any time is very well aware.  For the most part it is a species of marketing for a particular consumption model which does not pay enough (or sometimes any) attention to underlying business need. Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman made well known assaults on “Cloud” when the term first began to gain currency around 2008. Other veterans I met referred to it as IBM Bureau Computing reborn, Network Computing for the broadband age or, my favourite, from a gleeful representative of a well-known multinational, “outsourcing without service level agreements”. The early criticisms were valid in the context they were made and might have remained valid had something not changed. But something has changed, very rapidly.

This week we are delighted to welcome Torsten Budesheim Director of Marketing at Taulia as a guest blogger. --- Recent surveys confirm that e-invoicing has finally reached the early majority of users in the technology adoption life-cycle. Paystream Advisors, in a late 2010 survey found that 40% of their survey participants had plans to adopt e-invoicing. This all looks very promising and should help Accounts Payable (AP) organizations around the globe increase operational efficiencies and at a minimum, realize savings from reduction of the time spent for data entry and exception handling.

There are two types of people. Those who get twitter and those who don't. It's genetic. You may or may not get why it’s important to purchasing professionals but whether you are a social networker or not there are some extremely valuable lessons to be learned from the twittersphere and one lesson in particular that some of you are not going to like.