Cloud fogs business customers

Ovum has warned vendors to drop hype around BPaaS or risk losing customers in confusion.

In a report, Thomas Reuner, Ovum Principal Analyst said that most marketing messages being bought out by vendors are reminiscent of the early hype around cloud services.

However this is sending the wrong message to customers, because they are overselling technology rather than the human interaction in the business process.

He thinks that business-process-as-a-service (BpaaS) is a future vision for companies but for some reason buying organisations have not worked that out yet because they are getting the wrong marketing message.

Reuner said that BPaaS is the logical evolution of cloud services, where standardised processes have been wrapped around software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.

He said that an assessment of cloud services and services adopting cloud components needs to be conducted within the wider framework of industrialisation.

Platform business process outsourcing (BPO) delivery need to be discussed around cloud computing needs that are balanced with the complexities that buying organisations currently face, Reuner adds.
He said that the industry is making the same mistakes reminiscent of the early days of BPO at the beginning of the millennium.

Vendors should not use platform BPO and BPaaS interchangeably when they are talking to clients.

Providers were making business processes too complex and this was going against the trend of reducing the number of suppliers needed to provide a service, he said.

Reuner added that despite being highly standardised offerings, cloud services (and so BPaaS) will lead to more complexity for buying organizations as cloud standards have still to emerge.
He said that it would take new rules to make this a reality.

Pushing towards platforms was increasingly accompanied by bundling of infrastructure components as part of the BPO contract and the line between IT outsourcing and BPO was becoming blurred.