In an October, 2009 report from Information Week entitled “Alternative IT: Software’s New Reality” the author describes how CIOs today are more willing than ever to explore and accept alternative models for providing IT solutions to their organizations. While many organizations will continue with the traditional model of software delivery (licensed software running on in-house servers supported by in-house IT staff), alternative IT solutions are gaining greater acceptance, even in large enterprises. They go by many names, “software as a service”, “cloud computing”, and outsourcing in many different flavors, but one thing all of these alternatives strategies have in common is that the systems are moving out of the in-house IT shop in one way or another.

Even Microsoft, who has made its fortune selling software to run on its customers’ computers, is changing its tune and is planning to offer Microsoft Office, one of the most widely installed software programs in the industry, as an online application. We predict there will come a tipping point of sorts in the acceptance of new computing models. Consider salesforce.com. When we first heard of the salesforce.com model our thinking was “this will never work, sales organizations will never let this precious data off-site”. Wrong. Salesforce.com is a juggernaut in the CRM world with hundreds of very large clients. We think the same type of shift will happen in many more application areas as CIOs see others take the leap and become more comfortable with alternative IT models.