How the Cloud Continuum Will Reshape Businesses

Continuum competitors are leveraging cloud-based technologies to transform their businesses. Karthik Narain, lead of cloud-first, Accenture, discusses four critical actions to become continuum competitors.

Carlsberg had a problem. In an environment where costs were rising fast and consumer tastes changing dramatically, growth was hard to come by. Something had to change.  

What happened next is truly inspiring. The Danish brewer doubled down on the cloud to enable wholesale digital transformation. Through its Sail ’22 program, the company transitioned 100% of its global process workloads to the cloud. The results speak for themselves: major systems incidents down from 13 per month to five, network capacity boosted ten times, and operating costs slashed. 

More importantly, innovation thrived from IoT-enabled beer kegs that link marketing campaigns to real-time consumption data, to smart breweries where production issues are automatically flagged and solved rapidly, self-service tools, and bots that have transformed the employee experience. Carlsberg today is a digital leader.  

Continuum Competitors 

The company realized something that all of us know: the more you invest in something, the better the outcome. The cloud is no different. Organizations can dip toes into the waters of the cloud, but others dive straight in, immersing themselves in the technology and approach and thriving as a result. The latter is what we call continuum competitors enterprises that see the cloud as a continuum of capabilities spanning the public cloud to the edge and everything in between. 

The difference between most businesses and continuum competitors is that the former still see the cloud as a “once and done” cost-saving activity simply a means of migrating workloads to a cheaper, more efficient data center. Continuum competitors. on the other hand, treat the cloud as a continually evolving operating model for innovation. They integrate their cloud infrastructures, connect them with cloud-first networks and optimize them with best practices. 

As a result, these businesses are using cloud and data to redefine their interactions with customers, partners and employees, reinvent how they make and market their products and services, and how they architect and operate their IT infrastructure. 

See More: Cloud-Native Persistent Storage: 4 Key Deployment Considerations

The Continuum Difference

According to research conducted for Accenture’s new report, Ever Ready for Every Opportunity: How to Unleash Competitiveness on the Cloud Continuum, the difference in approach leads to significantly better business outcomes for the small subset around 12% of enterprises that are continuum competitors. 

For example, they are two-to-three times more likely to innovate and re-engineer knowledge work. They also achieve much greater cost savings than their peers (1.2 times greater in the U.S. and 2.7 times greater in Europe). Even sustainability and financial goals are bolstered, as continuum competitors are three times more likely to leverage the cloud to pursue energy-saving initiatives while targeting up to 50% more business measures such as accelerating the growth of their customer base or their go-to-market speed.

If any doubt remained, it can now be put aside. The deeper you go into the cloud, and the more you integrate your cloud capabilities, the more benefits you will experience. Without that integration, businesses will succeed only in creating cloud silos that stop the innovation, data and best practices achieved in one part of the organization from benefiting others. 

See More: Leverage Cloud To Transform Engineering and Build an Agile Model

Make the Leap, Take the Lead

This all begs the crucial question: what steps can businesses take to become continuum competitors? From studying the work of Carlsberg and a range of other continuum leaders, including Siemens, 3M, Starbucks, Roche, and Walgreens, we’ve identified four key actions that any company can take:

1. Have a clear vision – Every journey should begin with a strategy that identifies competitive vulnerabilities and clearly defines core values as well as current and future capabilities
2. Couple technology adoption with cloud practices that support the pace of change – Agility is a mindset that needs to be established for cloud-first apps, talent transformation, IT experimentation and compute awareness to thrive
3. Prioritize experience above all – Push it closer to where customers, partners and employees engage by using human-centered design and cloud-based technologies such as edge computing.
4. Recognize the all-hands nature of cloud transformation – Inform everyone across your organization of the cloud’s ever-improving potential and best practices by establishing business objectives, setting appropriate risk levels and promoting and culture of agility and growth

Continuum competitors are redefining what it means to leverage the potential of the cloud. They are using cloud-based technologies such as AI/ML, hybrid cloud, edge, 5G, platform-as-a-service, and others to upgrade their factories, optimize supply chains, and inject sustainability into their products. More importantly, they are reshaping their industries through innovation and agility. As economies recover from the pandemic, Continuum competitors will be best placed to innovate and thrive. Now is the time to join their number.

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