Did I mention cloud prices are likely to come down?

If you have been convinced the cloud is not for you because it still seems expensive compared to using your own servers, it may be time to look again.

Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, the database and ERP business that now promotes itself as a cloud and infrastructure provider, has just launched new products on its cloud platform and has taken a direct swipe at Amazon Web Services. Ellison has claimed, “Our new Archive Storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it’s one-tenth their price.”

When a market place can be this dramatically disrupted by a new technology solution it will change the way business is done.

This is going to make a big difference to the decision process of in-house or in-the-cloud that is going on every day. As the cloud gets scale and gets investment on delivering faster, cheaper and better services, there is little benefit to be found in clutching to ageing infrastructure or indeed in replacing it with an ongoing liability.

No doubt the new technology that has made these cost reductions possible is going to be deployed by other cloud applications and platform vendors as they compete to win market share. The clear winner in this battle of giants is any business owner, large or small, who can find better ways of removing the hassles of managing IT in their business and get on to finding more ways to do business profitably.

The giants in the cloud space are winning revenue and they all want to hold onto it for as long as they can, so right now there is massive development going on to improve the technology and the service offerings of cloud. It is only by driving down internal costs that profit can be extracted from this cloud revenue and so we are viewing one of the biggest technology evolutions and revolutions we have ever seen.

I hope you are finding ways to take advantage of this exciting opportunity in your business.

David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that is known for Business IT that makes sense. How can we help?