Spending less for more: is the edict in lean economic times, and 'cloud computing' offers that option.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: TECH GUIDE [2009]

Recessionary-spending squeezes have never been salad days for technology vendors. But many options available to today's corporate information technology buyer represent less investment, not more.

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"We're right back where we were seven years ago," says Brad Weydert, president of Englewood-based Statera, a technology services provider and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. "Clients are starting to get tight again. For any of the hardware providers, it's going to be very tough."

The big IT trend for 2009?

"Anything you can do to take costs down," Weydert says.

Take software as a service (SaaS). The decentralization of enterprise software brings a whole new economy of scale to IT, according to David Cohen, the Boulder-based serial entrepreneur, investor and editor of Colorado-Startups.com. His broad advice for IT buyers in 2009 is "to consider software-as-a-service-based solutions whenever possible."

"They require less up-front investment and ease the burden of local deployment and management," Cohen says. "More SaaS solutions are emerging that can take advantage of cloud-based storage and computer infrastructure that simply aren't economical for individual businesses to try to use. So as companies move to more service-oriented solutions, those solutions will economically scale well and will be more reliable and more available than might otherwise be possible."

When Cohen says "cloud-based," he's referring to what the tech community broadly refers to as "cloud computing." When an enterprise is operating "in the cloud," as those in the know say, all of your software is Internet-based and outsourced to vendors at a much lower cost than it would be to install the necessary infrastructure. In essence, data is no longer housed on computer desktops but on remote servers, and users can more easily access that data from anywhere in the world.

Beyond the paradigm shifts toward SaaS and cloud computing, Cohen sees plenty of new technologies that businesses of any size could leverage for next to no investment.

"I'm interested in what most people are calling 'Enterprise 2.0,"' he says. "In general, these are technologies that have grown up on the consumer Web, but are now making their way into corporate settings. This includes wikis, blogs, social intelligence, wisdom of the crowds, microblogging, and the like. Many--but not all--of these have very real potential as productivity enhancers in a corporate setting."

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