The company’s agenda includes adding vertical functionality (such as healthcare functions) to horizontal systems. For example, the company will extend its core HR system with hospital staff scheduling functionality.
Looking ahead to the future in healthcare, Sicilia predicted that hospitals will operate a higher number of smaller, dispersed sites that are closer to patients, with more care (and clinical drug trials as well) taking place outside of hospital settings.
Asked what has pushed industry clouds to the forefront in the last 18 to 24 months, Sicilia said Covid was a huge factor. The flexibility afforded by cloud apps to scale up and down elastically (hotels as well as food and beverage customers, for example, had to scale down dramatically and then scale back up) is a major win for customers and a major factor in their adoption of industry clouds. “If you can’t scale the entire ecosystem up and down, that really becomes a problem from an ops standpoint,” he said. Sicilia also credited Cloud Wars and Evans specifically with playing a thought leadership role that has created a high level of awareness for industry clouds.
