Companies Seek Business Value From the Cloud

The cloud has emerged as far more than an industry buzzword or flavor of the month. A substantial number of IT leaders are looking to make continued investments in cloud computing to lower IT costs and replace legacy systems that have outlived their usefulness, according to a recent survey conducted by IDC and commissioned by T-Systems. And they're very interested in moving enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions to this environment. "As the U.S. cloud services market continues to mature, enterprises are finding that overall business impact and productivity gains from the cloud are as significant as the cost reductions," says David Tapper, IDC's vice president over outsourcing and offshore services market research. For now, private cloud adoption is outpacing public cloud adoption. More than 500 CIOs and senior-level IT decision-makers took part in the research.