Leverage from Boutique Hosted Services
I continue to ponder the implications of people with rare skillsets who are capable of making huge operational impacts on companies. Skillsets like a combination of business knowledge and predictive analytics, of which I've recently become enthralled.
One of the areas that seem to be untapped so far but with a metric ton of potential is leveraging these unique individuals by way of hosted services.
Side Note: I'm reluctant to use the word "Leveraging", by the way, because it is often used incorrectly. When used properly and not by somebody who is simply trying to sound smart, it means that you get more work out of something than you put in. (Hence the word lever, duh). When used correctly it can increase your productivity exponentially, when used incorrectly it can bankrupt you, and when used by somebody who doesn't understand what the word means it is a synonym for the verb "to use".
Anyway, the one benefit of a cloud software model is that rare commodities can be shared among many different companies for little to no additional cost (more work out than in, or "leverage"). To date I've rarely seen this done, most of the Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are simply cloud versions of their desktop cousins.
If you have a premise-based solution then you need your own tools/technology expert as well as your domain expert, preferably in the same person. As I wrote before, people who have mastered these synergistic (another perfectly useful word which has been banished to buzzword hell, thanks middle managers everywhere) domains are extremely rare. Even the investment banks with billions of dollars at stake couldn't locate these people efficiently.
But boutique hosted services who can find these people with the extraordinary skillsets can offer these people to multiple customers at once. Web 2.0 laid the groundwork for hosted solutions, and here is a perfectly compelling reason why a hosted model is much more valuable than a premise-based solution can be, by bundling expertise along with the software. A single team of master analysts can work for many companies at the same time, providing their expertise just as easily to 100 companies as they can to 1. Leverage.
I'm thinking, for example, of a hosted CRM application driven by a domain expert which will identify the characteristics of your most profitable customers for you. Your products which are most likely to sell based on seasonal and historical trends could be highlighted so your salesforce can promote them more heavily. Or your hosted source control platform could identify areas of code which tend to be bug-prone so that you could focus your time-consuming processes on those areas and let developers have freer reign (and be more productive) in other areas.
The reason I call this boutique is because in order to truly derive the maximum value from these services they should be tailored to a specific vertical. This is the long tail in the extreme, but at the same time the value that can be derived from it probably dwarfs 95% of the rest of the tail. This is some seriously cool stuff that can easily revolutionize entire businesses.
This idea flies in the face of recent trend toward "one size fits all" hosted applications. It essentially says that one size can't fit all, your results will only be as good as the team that produces them. But hosted services will allow you to hire the best teams out there by proxy.
I'm not aware of anyone out there actually doing this type of boutique service, but as I delve further into these esoteric but insanely cool technologies I'm becoming increasingly interested in them. If anyone knows of such a firm I'd love a link and I'll be more than happy to post them up here.
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