Cloudy days ahead

It has been a busy, busy November and things probably won't change much in December as well. We have just embarked on several projects with several customers, and I must say that we are very pleased with things this year.

In the hustle and bustle of the month, I had a visitor today. Mr. Allain Thompson, the Channels Manager of our principal, Iron Mountain Digital, was in town today. We had one customer visit for him and while I was driving Allain around, I had a good chat with him. Interestingly, in our conversation, I began to reflect how the customers' business model has changed this year.

In previous year, customers would purchase and implement the solution outright. In the course of those years owning the equipment, the IT department is commissioned to build, operate and manage the solution. However, this year, things has changed quite a bit. In several of the larger projects, we are beginning to take on multi-year projects, where the customers pays a monthly "subscription" fee. And these weren't something we proposed but something the customer requested.

As I delved deeper, the dynamics of the business operating model as change. It is moving towards IT-as-a-Service and in many ways, Cloud Computing. It is beginning to look and feel like customers are buying IT services as if it was a utility. Perhaps it took a while before it reached the shores of Malaysia, but to us at Real Data Matrix, this year of 2010 is the year of the beginning of the Cloud. Yes, it's cloudy days ahead and it ain't bad. In fact, it is more than good. It's great. Why?

Very simply, the monthly revenues address a very significant portion of our operations and with multi-year contracts, we are well assured of monthly revenue. This means that we have to adapt to the businesses needs and should look into new ways of offering our solutions and services. And we are already doing that. Providing things like Cloud-Service Activation for NetApp as well as Service Catalog for NetApp Storage-on-Demand are some of the initial offerings Real Data Matrix has been providing to our customers. And I am planning 2011 will be an even more eventful when it comes to Cloud Computing services.

It is indeed cloudy days ahead.