If someone told you that you could drop your operating costs by 40 percent, would you listen? If that same person said you could you save between $70 and $150 per user per year in energy savings alone if you tried something new, would you try it?
A lot of companies are listening, and those same businesses are trying something new — cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) — and reaping the many benefits, which start with the aforementioned cost savings.
“From a cost perspective, it’s low-risk,” says Adam Caplan, founder and CEO of Chicago-based Model Metrics, a cloud-computing services firm. “You don’t have to pay monstrous upfront payments. It’s success-base as you go — you pay per user for cloud applications.”
With a model like that, it’s easy to save money, which is one of the biggest appeals of cloud technologies.
“There’s a tremendous amount of money to be saved because if you look at IT budgets, nearly 80 percent of that budget, in many cases, is spent just to keep the lights on, which means the other 20 percent is the only money that’s actually able to be used to implement new technologies into the model,” says Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer at Wyse Technology.
McNaught’s company builds a device that replaces the PC and connects you to the cloud. The device doesn’t make a lot of noise, but more importantly, it doesn’t cost a lot of money.
“When you look at cloud computing, operating expenses can drop by about 40 percent a year, and that’s real money,” he says. “These devices use one-tenth of the energy of the PCs. Now you’re really talking about saving real money.”
