Making Money on the Cloud – How One Company Does It
Seems we hear a lot about companies making halting steps to cloud computing by moving certain services off internal servers and onto the cloud, for example, email. So far much of the focus has been on saving money.
But increasingly, there’s evidence that companies are using their business (dollars and) sense to make money on the cloud. A San Francisco Chronicle story I read spotlighted how one company, TransUnion, a credit reporting company, which traditionally built custom software for banks, retailers and other companies to check the credit histories of consumers, is now offering revenue-generating applications to its customers as a cloud service.
The Old versus the New
Here’s how it used to work for TransUnion.
The company would build software for customers, but because development is people-intensive and can be slow, it typically cut into the profits that TransUnion could make on each project. It used to take weeks or months for the company to build a new service. On top of that, sometimes the firm had the headache of dealing with a backlog of requests – stretching sometimes for 90 days or more.
Would one of your customers wait around for a product or service for three months?
Now, TransUnion has begun offering its customers access to its data through APIs. Customers can now build their own applications and access consumer credit data via TransUnion’s private cloud. When a customer requests service, TransUnion can provide access to the appropriate APIs within a week. Big improvement over 90 days!
And as far as cost goes, TransUnion offers the same services and data as it always has, but opening APIs to customers costs less than developing custom software.
The company has not neglected security issues, either. It uses an access management appliance to control which customers can access which APIs. That is based on profiles that TransUnion and the customer collaborate on together.
I suggest you check out the full article on how companies are making money on the cloud. It’s a great read!
