2011 Cloud Computing Predictions For CIO’s And Business Technology Leaders — from Forbes.com by Ray Wang

The Bottom Line: Cloud Adoption Provides A Path To The Next Generation Enterprise
Cloud adoption is inevitable.   Business technology leaders will move beyond “try and buy” across the Cloud Stack for seven reasons:

  1. The cloud has moved from “when” to “how”
  2. As the economic climate improves, the cloud adoption discussions are moving from cost to value and from tactical to strategic
  3. Reducing hardware cost, increasing competition amongst vendors, and economies of scale have put the customers in a driver’s seat
  4. Customers have realized that TCO of software should be a vendor’s problem, and not theirs
  5. Cloud will deliver the optimization savings to pay for future innovations
  6. Future innovations will arrive cloud first and maybe never as an option on-premises
  7. Time to value, ease of use, and good-enough functionality will lead as the primary drivers for SaaS adoption