Cloud computing technology is poised to revolutionize enterprise computing by reducing costs and infrastructure complexity, while providing greater flexibility.
Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda Survey found that technology executives expect to expand their use of cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies significantly. Three percent of executives currently have the majority of their IT systems running in the cloud; in the next four years, that number could leap to 43%. In the future, data, applications, storage capacity, and the servers providing the processing horsepower could move out of the enterprise and into the cloud, where companies can manage an increasingly complex IT infrastructure without having to invest in costly hardware or support capabilities.
But what does this mean for line-of-business mobile applications—warehouse management, field service, sales, maintenance? Cloud solutions for these applications can provide significant savings via lower infrastructure and support costs, faster implementations, faster application updates, and more flexible configuration models.
According to data from ABI Research, by 2015 more than 240 million business customers will leverage cloud computing services via mobile devices, pushing mobile cloud revenues to $5.2B. Much of this growth will be driven by providing access to enterprise data via cloud-based mobile applications. A more specific study conducted by The Service Council found that 53% of field service organizations surveyed were considering or planning to leverage cloud computing in their field service operations in the next two years.
