| | DECEMBER 20188CIORevieweflecting on our lives, societies and busi-nesses around us in the past decade, it seems everything has changed and will continue to change. Nowadays, our life starts with mobile and finishes with mobile; right from planning vacation, doing banking, applying to a job, video calls with our loved ones, e-shopping, explaining difficult concepts to our kids through videos, researching on investment list just goes on.These use-cases are changing business landscape opening new op-portunities. Some companies have leveraged this opportunity well, which led to complete change in global fortune-500 top-10 list and gave birth to first generation world's richest. This makes our minds stuck to the intriguing question, why is this much change? `Digital & Tech-nology' is driving these changes lead-ing to both `enabling' and `disrupt-ing' businesses, for example, while it gave birth to Amazon and Apple, it led to the demise of once well-known brands such as Nokia, Kodak, and Blackberry.`Technology evolution' is at the core of this disruption and `Cloud' is prominent technology democratizing technology and driving digital pen-etration deep. `Cloud' made digital adoption economically viable, gave businesses technological speed and elasticity and opened up new busi-ness opportunities. Let's dig deeper into these aspect:1. Making economic sense and driv-ing economic viability: The biggest barrier to technology adoption is the cost (capital investment), both on consumer and organization side. While sharp drop in avg. mobile price along with `data services' price rationalization drove `higher tech-nology adoption' among consum-ers, `Cloud' drove cost down for organizations. With 'Cloud', cap-ital investment requirement went down as organizations only had to pay for the utilized `computing and storage capacity' rather than paying upfront for the next 5-6 years and then depreciating.Cloud helped companies to of-fer `pay-as-you-use' pricing model, a shift from `Capex' to `Opex' financial model, allowing financially crunched start-ups and MSME to pay only for the time s/w is being used rather than paying a hefty s/w license fee. This shift to `distributed pricing' model freed up `financial resources' and `or-ganizational energy' led to more fo-cus and investment in core business-es, enabled the start-ups to kick-start the innovation cycle, and MSME to adopt `digital' making MSME sec-tor more efficient and productive. Cloud really broke the economic barrier catalysing ecosystem to jump-start innovation and penetrating digital deeper.2. Managing businesses unpre-dictability and giving our business speed, scale and agility a competi-tive edge: In the modern age, our lives have become lightning fast and same behaviour reflects into our ex-pectations from businesses. This be-havioural change led to the need for reduced `time-to-market' cycle. In such a business environment `Speed and agility' become a critical com-petitive edge. Cloud helped here by reducing infrastructure/software pro-curement cycle time, which, in-turn reduced the overall product/feature time-to-market. Scaling up `technology' to sup-port business growth is another challenge that businesses face! While there may be a clear market oppor-tunity, many a time, time needed for `technological ramp-up' slows down the business pace, and that is where `Cloud' becomes saviour again, and RMastercard offers products and solutions that make everyday commerce activities ­ such as shopping, travelling, running a business and managing finances ­ easier, more secure and more efficient for everyone.CLOUD: DEMOCRATIZING TECHNOLOGY AND A LEVER FOR DIGITAL REVOLUTION By Manish Gupta, Director - Digital Transformation & Innovation, Marketing Technology at MasterCard IN MY OPINIONManish Gupta
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