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Today it is all about control of expenditure and flexible procurement. Businesses must sustain a level of financial management that allows almost immediate increases and decreases in investment and spend to respond to sudden changes in the wider economic environment. As a result this trend has accelerated; ushering in the advent of the 'Pay As You Go' (PAYG) Enterprise.
PAYG in the business sector is all about minimising CAPEX and controlling OPEX: increasing business agility and flexibility, while reducing exposure to depreciation, is the name of the game. Businesses increasingly rent rather than buy commercial space as property values fluctuate, and the proportion of contract workers versus 'permanent' workers has increased across Europe over the past few years. Businesses have less commercial reason to own buildings, cars, furniture or people. But this new demand related to the acquisition, access and procurement of resources is different to the traditional lease/termed-contract approaches of the past that predominantly impacted commercial property, employment and office equipment.
Pay as you go IT could revolutionise the workplace
Going far beyond the typical lease hire agreements on photocopiers, printers, laptops and PCs that are already familiar to most, operational IT - the network, the servers, the data centre - is where the PAYG revolution will have most impact. And it is one that could revolutionise how we work, and even our lives, significantly.
Of course, these are the kind of claims that have been made many times before. But there are three things that are driving the advance of the PAYG Enterprise, in addition to the economic environment.
First, is the mobility that underpins the way we live today. Consumer devices are becoming, and in many industries already are, the main means of communications and access to commercial platforms and applications. It may have been driven by the commercialisation of consumer technologies in the beginning, but the benefits of enabling remote working - and remote workers, not requiring office space, chairs, tables, fixed lines, and so on - has been recognised as a profit-driver that offers faster, better customer service, and ensures the business remains competitive. This has tremendous implications for the network and the data centre, where traditionally a company's information, knowledge and data was held all together, in one place, on company owned servers, secured and managed by company employees.
Now data and commercially sensitive information can reside almost anywhere thanks to this mobilisation of workers. And at the same time ensuring they can still connect to the company systems via wireless rather than wired devices is vital, and requires a level of flexibility and resilience not present in most traditional IT infrastructures.
The rise of the cloud has major impact
This has been one of the drivers of the second change - the rise of 'cloud'. There is a lot of noise and promotion about 'the cloud' and definitions vary, but simply put cloud provides that flexible IT infrastructure, which may be owned, or may be offered by a third party. Cloud also underpins one of the biggest trends in IT right now - adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS). In August 2011, IDC reported that by 2015 SaaS revenues will have grown to $53.6 billion, outpacing traditional software product delivery to account for nearly $1 of every $6 spent on software2.
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