– John Barnes, CTO of Model Metrics (www.modelmetrics.com), says:
We have seen small and midsized enterprises lead the way and really gain a competitive advantage by adopting cloud computing. That’s the beauty of the cloud; it puts enterprise class software into the hands of small businesses that typically couldn’t’t afford an expensive on-premise package. For example TripZipr is a startup that wanted to be prepared for success, without a heavy investment in infrastructure that is typically required from a startup. We helped them move their website to Amazon Web Services in just a few days where they are paying pennies an hour for their server time, but the site can scale on a dime and grow if TripZipr suddenly takes off.
IT/data center managers need to realize that as cloud computing becomes more prevalent and accepted that their business users may go directly to the cloud vendors instead of coming to IT when they need a solution. It is much better to proactively get in front of this trend and realize that it will free them from the burden of supporting their own data center and getting calls in the middle of the night around server crashes and let them focus on more strategic tasks that deliver business value. We have seen IT departments who have embraced cloud computing move from an adversarial relationship with the business and become the rockstars of the company because they can deliver projects so quickly using the cloud.
