Does a company want profitability for its people or for its shareholders/investors/owners ? Or is it a combination?

Pretty much a no brainer right? Your are in business to make money and profits are the way we measure the amount of money made and shows a scale of success. Profits and losses are indications of whether we’re doing the right things or not. It’s how the people in the marketplace tell a business what is needed and wanted, what should be eliminated, what should be expanded, what needs to be improved, etc. Profits and losses constitute important feedback that improves economic efficiency.

Profits also enable us to grow. If what we’re doing is good, then we need to grow so we can do more good. If we don’t make profits, then there’s something wrong with what we’re doing, and we deserve to go out of business. Businesses rely on profits to buy:

• expand operations and
• new inventory
• finance product development.

Without profit, a business would stagnate and risk losing its market share to other competitors. Large businesses need to raise profits to:

• keep share prices high and
• pay dividends to shareholders.

If a large business does not generate a profit, its share price falls, which means it cannot raise as much money with share sales and cannot borrow from banks as easily. Companies with falling share prices often become the targets of hostile takeovers by rival firms.

So okay…we get it from  business standpoint, but how about from a People standpoint?

I want to keep this one simple. So, like when I was growing up, we used to count the ways. Here are a few of my opinions (and you know what they say about opinions) and ideas…what are yours??

•  we can employ more People.
• we can employ People longer
• we can give People opportunity.
• we can give People more.
• we can give People’s children more.
• we can help change or shape People’s life’s.
• we can give People higher standards of living.
• we can give People better healthcare choices.
• we can improve People’s chances of survival.
• we give people a chance to be more productive.
• productivity usually increases profitability

 And isn’t profitability what we are trying to achieve?

What have I missed?

End of the day…Bottom line Profitability may just be all about People. It may be much more.

What do you think?

Limitless Technology~CRS

Delivering expert results on: telecom auditing, telecom contract management, telecom expense management, and telecom billing optimization services.

www.limitlesstechnology.com

That was the advice delivered by analyst Daryl Plummer during Gartner’s IT Symposium Tuesday. Plummer says that there are many potential benefits to deploying cloud services, including agility, reduced cost, reduced complexity, increased focus, increased innovation and being able to leverage the knowledge and skills of people outside the company.

The trick for IT professionals is to perform a thorough analysis that identifies which benefits the company hopes to achieve by moving to the cloud. Of course, there are also reasons to not take the cloud route. Those include the inability to get the service-level agreements that you want, regulatory and compliance issues, concerns about disaster recovery and the realization that the cloud might not end up saving you money.

Plummer said an accurate cost analysis is particularly tricky, since you’re weighing capital expenses versus recurring costs. He added that customers often underestimate their cloud usage costs, and most companies moving to the cloud will require the services of a cloud broker, which adds to the total tab.

While the cloud hype has reached a fever pitch, Plummer points out that there are a number of potential risks. Those include security, transparency, assurance, lock-in and integration issues. If you do decide to start moving applications to the cloud, start at the edges and work your way into the core, says Plummer. The most common apps to start with are email, social, test and development, productivity apps and Web servers.

One other point to keep in mind is that individual business units have probably already moved to software as a service (SaaS), so Plummer recommends that IT execs make a concerted effort to get ahead of these rogue SaaS users.

If you break cloud revenues down by the three main categories, SaaS revenues come in first at $12 billion worldwide in 2011, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) at $4.2 billion and platform as a service (PaaS) at $1.4 billion. But Gartner predicts that over the next five years IaaS will grow by 48%, while PaaS will only grow 13% and SaaS will grow 16.3%.