Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts.

I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. Cloud computing gives a great benefit in support costs and operating costs.

the article is interesting, but it misses the white elephant in the room. The main cost benefit from cloud computing is that it eliminates the need for IT staff. If you do not have to support data centers, HW, systems integration, etc., there is a huge cost savings.

In enterprises with existing IT departments, those IT departments should oppose cloud computing because it will eliminate 70 to 80% of their jobs. There are some business analyst positions that remain and a small number of desktop support positions that remain, but otherwise the rest of the staff become redundant.

As someone who sells a SaaS product, my biggest opposition in enterprises is the IT staff. While this is frustrating, it is certainly understandable. This, however, has importance for project managers, SaaS vendors and business in general.

Where the real gains will come from with SaaS, will be from small companies that can leverage SaaS, see dramatically increased productivity levels with dramatically lower fixed costs. If a company with 70 people can use SaaS ERP/CRM type systems to double or even triple their productivity without increasing their staffing/fixed costs, guess who's going to be very successful in the next 10 years?

A company that has a 20% to 30% fewer fixed costs (no IT department, no internal servers, customized processes etc) is going to eat the lunch of companies having to carry those costs.

Experienced project managers who can assist these companies achieving these very realistic goals are going to be heros.

Enterprises that have existing IT staffs, who for good reason, oppose the introduction of SaaS technologies, are going to be in trouble when these smaller businesses sort themselves out.

You're the sort of person who can help these smaller companies sort themselves out.