Coles is yet another complex cloud case study

blog We’ve been seeing some very interesting moves from retail giant Coles over the past several years with respect to cloud computing and software as a service adoption. Nothing revolutionary, but solid moves nonetheless. In March 2012 the retailer revealed it had picked Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution for a mass virtualisation rollout and in July it was SharePoint Online. This week further news on the issue comes from CIO Magazine, which tells us that Coles is in the middle of yet another major cloud journey. The publication reports (we recommend you click here for the full article):

“[Coles CIO Conrad Harvey] – along with a dedicated cloud team of about 15 staff members out of Coles’ 650-odd IT team – is working with Virtual Ark to set up a hybrid cloud environment for its Kronos-based ‘time and attendance’ workforce management application in order to quickly stand up testing and training of projects.”

What we’re seeing here from Coles is similar to what we’ve been seeing from Australia’s major banks over the past several years; complex adoption of point cloud computing and SaaS technologies where they can be best used. As I wrote about Westpac back in late 2011:

“Articles about the bank over the past year have made clear that Westpac is not using the services of one or two cloud computing vendors to meet its needs. Nor is it retraining itself to using just private clouds, or just public clouds, or just software as a service, or just infrastructure as a service. It’s using an “all of the above, when appropriate” approach which defies easy classification.”

Cloud computing, in Australia, has been through the peak of inflated expectations, the trough of disillusionment and even the slope of enlightment, as defined by Gartner’s infamous Hype Cycle. This whole class of new technologies is now being used as a matter of course to improve productivity throughout major Australian organisations. You’ll note that Coles’ language, when speaking about its own deployment, is very much around efficiency and not around new technology. And that’s precisely where it should be.