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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio candidates - Moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (2628)	11/1/2009 4:55:04 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2955

Ah, you are more interested in the why, not just it is? One of the uses is for a distributed organization since they can have centralized facilities without having to build a communications infrastructure. Another motivation is that it relieves the organization from having to manage their own computing center. For small to medium businesses, the risk of the cloud going down is actually lower than the risk of their own in-house machine going down. One of the big drivers is SaaS - Software as a Service, i.e., renting the application instead of buying it. This is great for starting small and scaling as fast as one grows without having to make major infrastructure changes and, if one then contracts, one doesn't have wasted resources. For the business, this provides a predictable and often low cost with no major up-front capital expenditures. For the vendor, it means a sustained revenue stream and reduced maintenance costs because not only is the cloud often providing the platform for this service, but one can do various levels of integration, e.g., one copy of the code supporting a large number of customers so there is only one copy to update. Better?