Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore is an interesting marketing book on the study of how new technologies, in particular disruptive technologies or products, successfully make their way into a market. It discusses how to move a technology from the ‘Early Adopters’, those brave souls who are willing to take a risk with a new technology, to the rest of us who want the benefits of the new technology without the risks. A few years ago, one could say that the use of the cloud was largely the domain of the Early Adopters. That is not so true today. Not only are private and public companies moving to the cloud, (See the eWeek story about how SMBs are leading in the adoption of cloud services), but now even the federal government is looking at the cloud, as is evidenced by the recently released details on the government's new FedRAMP Program, aimed at developing a standardized approach to assessing the security of a cloud solution.
There are three defined cloud types, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). If you or your company are using services such as DropBox, Amazon EC2, or Salesforce.com, you are using the cloud. Cloud services can be Public, Private, Community or a Hybrid. Public clouds are those services made available, most often, through the internet to a domain of public users. A Private cloud would be one that is utilized by a single organization. A Community cloud service would serve a specific community of users and a Hybrid Cloud would combine the aspects two or more of these cloud types.
As a SaaS provider of solutions for contact centers, NICE CXone has seen tremendous growth in the use of cloud services within the contact center market. For NICE CXone, 2011 was a great year, marked by an exciting increase in business and services and culminating in the deployment of two data centers in Germany. 2012 will be an even more propitious year as we begin with a press release that heralded a recent report from DMG Consulting LLC that named NICE CXone as the hosted contact center market share leader. As always, NICE CXone will be at the forefront not only in products and services, but in architecting a robust and secure platform. We look forward to working with our customers to build solutions that make them successful in what is becoming a truly global market.
