[box] A guest post from Richie Etware, leader in design thinking, organizational transformation, innovation, and thought leadership. Folow the lively discussion on the full article here.[/box]

Business leaders interested in the future of enterprise technology should stop thinking of “the cloud” as a noun and start thinking about “clouding” as a verb.

When we talk about cloud computing in general, we’re describing a set of efficiency principles only applied to once stateful compute and storage resources that are now stateless and liquid.

Clouding is not new, and compute, storage and network are not the only things that can be clouded.

Although the cloud concept has taken hold in enterprise technology, it’s not entirely new to other parts of life. One could argue, for example, that condominiums and hotels were early multitenant housing clouds. Airbnb are modern versions of housing clouds delivering housing as a service, and similarly, Zipcar and Uber are car clouds, offering consumers transportation as a service.

Anything can be clouded, if we put our minds to it. The clouding of compute resources gave rise to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). To make clouding meaningful, we can’t stop there, and we have not, we are clouding storage quickly and successfully. This explains the success of Box, DropBox, Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive and others.

There are other, unconventional opportunities for clouding to drive innovation, and advanced thinkers are gravitating to the notion of anything as a service, or heck everything as a service (EvaaS).

A modern enterprise with everything as a service.

In the new world of leading enterprises leveraging EvaaS, workspace can be a service (WsaaS); expertise can be a service (ExaaS); and business processes can be services (BPaaS). We can roll all three into an overarching industry as a service (InaaS) capability eventually delivering on the age old promise of standing up “XYZ in a Box” type businesses.

When everything is a stateless and a liquid service, entire environments can be orchestrated for specific jobs, demands, roles or expertise, creating the opportunity to eventually leverage humans as a service (HuaaS). HuaaS would be game changing to how companies procure, leverage, and strategically execute on their most valuable and expensive resource, human capacity.

[box type=”info”] The full article continues on LinkedIn.[/box]