NetApp’s Dave Hitz and others discuss doing business in the Cloud

Philip Lieberman, Founder, President and CEO, Lieberman Software Corp.

If someone told you that you could drop your operating costs by 40 percent, would you listen? If that same person said you could you save between $70 and $150 per user per year in energy savings alone if you tried something new, would you try it?
A lot of companies are listening, and those same businesses are trying something new — cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) — and reaping the many benefits, which start with the aforementioned cost savings.
“If you don’t have the money to invest in IT, in hardware, in software, in upgrades or you don’t have the expertise, then the cloud offerings are compelling,” says Philip Lieberman, founder, president and CEO of Lieberman Software Corp., which provides solutions used by large national defense and large corporations.
Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer at Wyse Technology says that 80 percent of an IT budget, in many cases, is spent just to keep the lights on.
“It’s about saving money, and there’s a tremendous amount of money to be saved,” McNaught says.
McNaught’s company builds a device that replaces the PC, uses one-tenth the energy of a PC and connects you to the cloud. The device doesn’t make a lot of noise, but more importantly, it doesn’t cost a lot of money.
“When you look at cloud computing, operating expenses can drop by about 40 percent a year, and that’s real money,” McNaught says. “These devices use one-tenth of the energy of the PCs. Now you’re really talking about saving real money.”