The time is right for cloud computing, said Marc Benioff, CEO at
Salesforce.com, in his keynote presentation at Salesforce.com's
Cloudforce conference in ExCel, London today.
"The old model of enterprise software is not working; paying
22.5% for maintenance every year, does not work," he said.
Cloud computing allows IT to innovate within business and is not
just suited to smaller companies with tight IT budgets.
"Enterprise software can run in the cloud, based on a
multi-tenant application, where everyone shares the same
infrastructure, which makes it much lower cost for everyone,"
Benioff said.
Cloud computing is the future of IT, he claimed. It supports
rapid business changes, because business do not need to build and
manage IT infrastructure.
"We are seeing applications moving to the cloud such as
financial software and human resources, and software platforms are
also moving to the cloud."
New cloud applications platforms are under development,
including Microsoft Azure, the next version of Windows, He said
Amazon and Google allow users to build applications on their cloud
platforms, rather than an internal datacentre.