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We have already seen examples starting in the US in particular spaces like the financial services. A lot of companies are offering specialized PaaS offerings around credit analysis, risk analysis, and specialty functions. This is also a great opportunity for companies to identify their core competencies, and to commercialize them. 

There’s a great example in the US of a company that does rental furniture, whose sole business is to rent future to low-income people. Once they realized one of their core competencies was analyzing people’s credit worthiness, and the risk of them to faulting. As a way to get a new business model, they went to the other retailers and said, “Tell us someone who you declined credit for to purchase something, and then we’ll contact them, and we’ll lease them [the furniture].”

So if you went in to a store and you got declined to purchase a new television set, this company will then contact you, working with another company, and say, “I can rent you that same television set for this price per month,” because they have the unique application to do the risk analysis.

Now, this company is looking to make that application available as a cloud service for the other retailers. 

Bunker: I’m seeing this happening globally. This because companies are recognizing their core competencies, and cloud computing gives them a new route to mark them. It’s a new way for them to package what they do very well, and make it available to other industries. 

This is very similar to the ASP (applications service providers) trend from five to 10 years ago. These ASPs used to operate on a very similar model -- making available one’s specialty around a core set of competencies.