Unbundling the Bank @ CloudCamp

The other night I tried my hand at a 5 minute cloudcamp presentation which was mad and to be honest didn’t go according to plan! But hey I’ve put all that down to life-long-learning now and in probably talking to the wrong audience!

Below is the deck I presented and for some most baffling reason, that I can’t explain, the deck centres on a conversation between a very scared banker and a pig on his head!

I came across it while hunting for images of banks and it made me really laugh at the time, but unfortunately I think it bombed a little on the day – no one (especially the OSS crowd) likes a guy from Microsoft trying to be funny – I had that feeling of the stand-up comedian confronted with silence once he’s delivered his best line! Urgh, the memory makes my skin crawl!

That said, I like the story and while the slides are great (of course;)!) I’ve had a go re-telling the story in a little more detail which I hope you’ll find fun and maybe even useful! You never know! This will follow as a separate post but in preparation here’s some background followed by the deck itself.

Some background

The title for the session came to me as you’ll know if you’re a regular to my blog, from the post I did the previous week that referenced an original post I did back in 2007 after seeing a session at QCon from Chris Swan and Craig Heimark. It came back to me a week or so ago when I got to talk to a group of around 30 Enterprise Architects for a large UK Bank. For too many the thought of using cloud was almost abhorrent and you could almost feel them each mouthing the words that “our bank will never use the cloud!”.

However, I had an ace up my sleeve being able to show, even back in 2008 through the work I did with Freeform Dynamics called IT on the front foot that Financial Services were among the leading adopters of Software as a Service (SaaS) at the time (remember the phrase cloud had not come to the fore at this time).

But what was perhaps more interesting was that contrary to popular belief, SaaS adoption is far more significant where IT is seen as a strategic advantage to the business. Most, especially many of the SaaS vendors wrongly argue that it’s an opportunity for business to bypass IT and focus their efforts on that of converting the business executives, avoiding what in reality could be a quicker route through IT itself. It is clear that with the early adopters, success has very much depended on IT being involved and potentially driving the agenda. To support this, it is increasingly the case as you listen to early Cloud adopters from IT who talk of the need to convince the business of the benefits of cloud versus the risks.

The final graph from the report I used shows that in the majority of cases SaaS adoption only takes place where there is a commitment to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)! This makes sense given the obvious concerns over storing data external to the organisation. An Enterprise that has a strategic position on Integration is clearly able to take advantage of the resultant hybrid model that must naturally follow.

The Slide Deck

View more presentations from Matt Deacon.

Next post will tell the story of The Pig, the Banker and the Cloud.