Is your cloud strategy centered on saving money or fueling revenue growth? Where you land on this question could determine a lot about your experience level with cloud services and what guidance you should be giving to your application developers and infrastructure & operations teams. According to our research the majority of CIOs would vote for the savings, seeing cloud computing as an evolution of outsourcing and hosting that can drive down capital and operations expenses. In some cases this is correct but in many the opposite will result. Using the cloud wrong may raise your costs.

But this isn’t a debate worth having because it’s the exploration of the use cases where it does save you money that bears the real fruit. And it’s through this experience that you can start shifting your thinking from cost savings to revenue opportunities. Forrester surveys show that the top reasons developers tap into cloud services (and the empowered non-developers in your business units) is to rapidly deploy new services and capabilities. And the drivers behind these efforts – new services, better customer experience and improved productivity. Translation: Revenues and profits.

If the cloud is bringing new money in the door, does it really matter if it’s the cheaper solution? Not at first. But over time using cloud as a revenue engine doesn’t necessarily mean high margins on that revenue. That’s where your experience with the cost advantaged uses of cloud come in.

Cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is a hot market. Amazon Web Services, now five years old, drives a lot of attention and customer volume, but the vendor strategists at enterprise-facing providers such as IBM, HP, AT&T and Verizon have been building and delivering IaaS offerings. As I’ve studied the market, I’ve heard wildly different types of requirements from buyers and quite a range of offerings from service providers. Yet much of the industry dialogue is about one central idea of what IaaS is – think that’s wrong headed. I found that there were really two buyer types: 1) informal buyers outside of the IT operations/data center manager organizations, such as engineers, scientists, marketing executives, and developers, and 2) formal buyers, the IT operations and data center managers responsible for operating applications and maintaining infrastructure.

With this idea in mind, I set out to test the views of IT infrastructure buyers in the Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010 and learned that:

• After 2+ years of cloud hype, only 6% of enterprises IT infrastructure respondents report using IaaS, with another 7% planning to implement by Q3, 2012. After flat adoption from 2008 to 2009, this represents an approximate doubling from 2009, off a very small base.
• Almost two thirds of IT infrastructure buyers themselves don’t believe they are the primary buyer of cloud IaaS! We asked them which groups in their company are using or most interested in cloud IaaS. Only 36% of IT infrastructure buyers listed themselves, while 7% didn’t know. The rest, 58% said that IT developers, Web site owners, business unit owners of batch compute intensive apps, and other business unit developers were more interested in using IaaS than themselves.