There was a useful article posted by Phil Wainewright on the ZDNet blog this week which I thought worthy of note here. It’s all well and good for cloud practitioners to tout the cost savings that the cloud offers, but where do these savings come from? The answer turns out to be a simple matter of economies of scale, which Phil depicts succinctly with a neat diagram in his article.

The argument becomes self-evident when you start to think of IT infrastructure and application services as just another utility for businesses to tap into, like electricity or water. It’s uncontested that to have a single electricity grid to feed thousands of businesses makes more economic sense than everyone having a generator in their basement. Similarly, cloud applications and the Platform-as-a-Service model, especially when used on a significant scale, reduce each customer’s IT total cost of ownership simply due to the economies of scale of the shared service.

Have a read of Phil’s article here.

Everyone “gets” the concept of Salesforce as the killer CRM system in the cloud; Salesforce owns that space. But with a bit of creativity, you’ll see that the underlying Force.com platform is where the real power is, especially for extending CRM to your customers. The good news? Salesforce CRM is part of Force.com, so everything is seamless. The catch? There genuinely isn’t one, simply the need for a little upfront ingenuity.

Here’s a demo. We’ve used Force.com Sites and custom content management in Salesforce to create an interactive corporate website, entirely in the cloud. Everything you see here is pure Force.com, with no third party tools or extra licences required.

Are the days of big ERP systems finished? What role does cloud computing play in reshaping the software industry?

Those were just two of the questions our Managing Director, Glenn Elliott answered when he featured on The Scoop, a business and technology podcast commissioned by the Australian Financial Review. He was joined by Grahame Reynolds, chairperson of the SAP Australian User Group, and Steve Hodgkinson, research director at Ovum.

Click here to listen to the interview online, or here to download the 20 minute segment as an MP3.