The way we deploy software is changing. Our research and others shows that enterprises are moving away from on-premise apps. and moving to private and public cloud offerings. But here is the basic question that is seldom asked. When a company deploys to the cloud does that boost revenue and returns to stockholders? Are high performing companies separating from low performers by their knowledge of and use of cloud technologies? Our recent Business Agility study says clearly that they are not.
Let me give some context for this statement. Forrester is putting significant effort into Business Agility – what it is, how it relates to the success of companies within industries, and what foundations business agility is built on. We’ve identified the three types of agility that companies must develop — Market, Organizational, and Process agility – and evaluate ten separate dimensions that make them up. We found out which of the ten dimensions were the most important, defined as driving growth in revenue and profit (see the Agility Performancereport).
And here’s the point. Infrastructure Elasticity – which is our agility dimension for all things cloud, accounted for almost no difference in enterprise performance. Enterprises aggressively embracing cloud solutions did not perform better than their peers. In fact in some industries, they performed worse.
More of the Forrester post by Craig Le Clair
