Are you crazy!!!?  Do you really think companies are going move applications housing sensitive financial and operational data into the cloud?  I mean seriously, the cloud is fine for family pictures, tweets, and viral video, but we're not putting our management reporting data out there!  Besides, didn't McKinsey just report that Amazon Web Services was 144% more expensive than internal servers?

As for the question about being crazy, I can't be too certain.  I also agree to an extent with McKinsey and Gartner that cloud computing is at the peak of the "hype cycle" right now.  However, the scope of analysis contained in the McKinsey report was so narrow and shortsighted that, save for the logo on the front, the study would have gone relatively unnoticed.  The financial analysis seemed so obviously incomplete that it reminded me of the kind of scientific study run by a pharma company that is trying to cast a drug's benefits in a very favorable light.  This article in CIO online, though clearly biased in favor of cloud computing, offers a cogent counterpoint to Mckinsey's "analysis".

For a moment, I am going to sidestep the entire debate between running production applications on virtualized internal servers versus cloud computing platforms.  There are other beneficial uses for cloud computing within the EPM (aka CPM, BPM, financial applications), BI and other enterprise software application markets that go beyond production application hosting.  Over the next few posts, I'll focus on some innovative uses for on-demand computing that avoid the geek holy wars (at least for now).

The Software Selection Speed Date

Lets say your company, or client if you work for a consulting firm, is going through a software selection to choose a new budgeting and planning application.  You march the top 3 or 4 vendors through a selection process involving an RFP, a series of software demos and maybe a conference room pilot.  You collect a mountain of data supporting a selection that you have, more likely than not, already made in your head either consciously or subconsciously.

In the end, you make a decision having spent very little actual time evaluating the application itself within the context of your business requirements.  Given the visibility, cost and organizational impact that selection decisions carry with them, wouldn't it be nice to spend a little more quality time with your "software spouse to be" before making a significant commitment?

Cloud computing's pay for use, on demand nature makes it a compelling platform for testing and evaluating enterprise apps. 

Between waiting on IT to provision testing servers and then installing the applications themselves, it can easily take four, six, or even eight weeks or more before you have an environment ready to begin testing on.  Wouldn't it be easier to fill out a simple webform, click a few buttons and have a fully operational sandbox testing server ready to run the next morning?

Since launching EPM Cloud with Amazon Web Services as a limited solution offering back in February, we have been contacted by many companies interested in using cloud sandboxes for evaluation, testing and development.  One company in particular, a household name financial services firm, told us that their IT department had already approved departmental use of public clouds such as Amazon for development and testing purposes.

Next week, I'll focus on the benefits of cloud sandbox environments for testing and evaluation from a software vendor's perspective.  Making it easy for existing and prospective customers to demo and evaluate their software is critical to the growth of software companies large and small.  As unintuitive as it may sound, this is often a more complex task for software vendors themselves than it is for their customers.

How is your organization using, or considering the use of, public cloud computing platforms?