Industry Cloud: A Driver for Enterprise Transformation

Cloud computing has evolved from just being perceived as a way to reduce and manage IT costs to becoming a key driver for enterprise transformation. The shift has been fueled by the confluence of social, mobile cloud, big-data and analytics technologies. In this paper, we introduce Industry Cloud as an aggregation of domain specific, workload optimized and value added capabilities supporting an industry and a foundation to drive the transformation. Enterprises are developing and deploying new types of solutions called System of Insight (SOI) solutions that connect enterprise data to customer engagement data with analytics to derive new insights. We discuss several examples of the solutions, and present a architecture pattern that we see emerging to support these solutions. We conclude the paper by highlighting some key research topics in cloud computing to support these emerging trends.