Much of the boom in the tech space is attributed to rapid increase in connectivity through mobile. That is a tremendous underestimation of what is going on right now in the tech world. Most of the ease if setting up and running businesses is because of the evolution of cloud architecture and not just because a user is able to access an app on phone.

Although mobile connectivity is serving the last mile, a significant amount of processing happens before the service reaches to the end user. And all of this has become seamless because of the cheap availability of compute, storage and bandwidth on the cloud. This much ignored fact leads to some misjudgments on several business models. Firstly if a business is serving only the end user without fully leveraging the power of cloud will never be efficient and will lose out to the competition soon enough. On the other hand, businesses purely focused on delivering cloud based services either directly to the users or to other applications will be definitely adding real value to the ecosystem.

In other words for any tech oriented company: “if you are not on cloud, you are dead”. Being on the cloud does not mean putting up a server on AWS or Azure. It involves 1. producing services for internal and external consumption, 2. consuming cloud services where ever possible rather than reinventing the wheel and of course 3. hosting data and compute on the cloud. In other words you have to be part of the cloud ecosystem.