Cloud

Cloud computing is quickly taking hold of business and consumer computing. Firms are recognizing there is little added value fiddling with their own server farms, technical staff, SOX compliance, upgrade nightmares (e.g. data migration, client deployments, …) and vendors that continually nickle and dime them for yearly maintenance fees for products that aren’t much different from the year ago.  This topic is defined by the intersection of consumer/business services, the internet, and hosted applications.

Business Services

Small and large businesses alike are eliminating their fixed cost investments in rapidly obsoleting equipment, and turning it into variable cost that scale elastically to their daily, or monthly demands.  Back offices are being scaled back, in favor or remotely accessed capability and data, as more and more consumer (travel, document management, shopping), and business (CRM, Accounting, Payroll, Insurance, Time keeping, benefits management, banking, ERP, teleconferencing, document management) services move into the cloud.

Consumer Services

Consumers are relying less and less on specialized services delivered through traditional agent/agency sales models, and more through  interaction with cloud based services, ranging from travel (Priceline, Hotwire, …), and on-line shopping (Amazon, e-Bay, retail e-commerce sites, “App Stores”, …), to personal media management (DropBox, MobileMe, …), and financial services (banking, and investments).