Murph points out, for example, that Microsoft has a financial solutions industry cloud yet many enterprises use IBM for financial services in the cloud and still other financial companies have developed a high-end solution in conjunction with NASDAQ that includes analytics and machine learning models.
Much of the focus of industry clouds to date has been on foundational aspects of doing business in the cloud, such as which workloads to migrate to the cloud, whether to lift and shift those workloads directly to the cloud, or redesign them from scratch into cloud-native applications. But as Idorsia’s use of Veeva shows, some industry clouds also offer industry-based tooling, such as “solutions that address regulatory challenges and controls in different sectors, as well as data models specific to different vertical sectors,” Murph says.
Due to their nature, industry clouds likely will remain collaborative affairs. “The industry-based cloud has to be an ecosystem that stitches different technologies together and solves different problems,” Murph says. “I don’t know that you’ll ever see one company dominate an industry cloud on its own.”
CIOs must think strategically before selecting an existing industry cloud solution or building a custom industry cloud with a partner, says Ashley Skyrme, global cloud first strategy and consulting lead at Accenture.
This involves “rewiring their value chain” of products, solutions, and services, namely rethinking their tech stack more strategically, orchestrating multiple data assets and unlocking data from many sources.
Skyrme pointed to Volkswagen as a great example of an enterprise that built an automotive cloud platform by opening up and collaborating across different industries to bring its supply chain together.
“It’s not a pre-formulated kit,” Skyrme says about defining the industry cloud. “We think of it as much more exhaustive across the cloud continuum. It’s an evolving ecosystem of standardized, reusable, and interoperable digital assets. That’s the holy grail of the industry cloud. Driving differentiation and growth … new products, new platforms, and new experiences.”
As for Idorsia, embracing an early but established life sciences industry cloud has no doubt enabled the startup to turn its R&D into a profitable business — which can be more challenging than the science itself. And Bejjani is one CIO who is glad he didn’t try to tackle it alone.
“We could do it, but it would be very time consuming and expensive,” he says. “Veeva already created the vertical for the pharmaceutical industry and the workflows and terminologies of the industry are pre-configured and embedded in their product.”
For enterprises like Idorsia whose tech stacks aren’t their key differentiator, the value proposition of industry clouds is compelling.
