The survey of 174 respondents found that 90 percent of the executives and 68 percent of the middle managers said they are using or plan to use Cloud-based services within two years. The survey by KPMG LLP, the audit, tax, and advisory firm, was Taken at the recent Oracle OpenWorld 2010 trade show in San Francisco.

 

"The survey results reflect wide acceptance of Cloud-based services among executives who are increasingly recognizing the Cloud's strategic business value," said Steve Hill, KPMG's national innovation leader. "Those surveyed also said that experimentation will be required to fully understand the value of Cloud-based operations, and this approach, they noted, will bring challenges that need to be addressed."

 

Specifically, 82 percent of all the respondents, which consisted of executives, middle managers, and staff, said that migration to the Cloud raises a broad set of issues around business transformation that should be understood and managed across the entire organization.

 

When asked to rate the importance of four factors driving a company or organization to pursue Cloud-based activities, 84 percent of those surveyed rated technical (scalability, security) as important or extremely important, while 78 percent viewed economics (cost savings, shifting capital expenditures to operational expenditures) as important or extremely important, and 76 percent placed functional (capabilities, accessibility) in that category, with 66 percent rating strategic factors (business process transformation, speed to market) as important or extremely important.

 

In addition, 79 percent of respondents said that Cloud is a viable option for enterprises to be more agile and cost competitive, and 74 percent said that organizations adopting Cloud can experience long-term competitive advantages.

 

"Those surveyed clearly recognize that in the migration to Cloud computing, strategic business considerations today decisively trump yesterday's technology discussion," Hill said. "Cloud-enabled environments, particularly community models, may facilitate paradigm changes in business models and in the core drivers of competitive differentiation."