Data points for agility as the driver for Cloud Computing

Randy Bias of CloudScaling.com has posted a 5-minute scene-setting presentation about Cloud Computing. He mentions an example where one company subdivision had such a long lead-time to get delivery of a server from another subdivision of the same company, they went to an outside provider instead. This points to agility as the primary driver to the Cloud. You can Randy's presentation (like his definition of Cloud Computing itself) in an "on-demand, self service fashion" via SlideShare here.

The agility argument is also borne out by recent Avanade research cited by Joe McKendrick, where agility, not cost, is the primary driver to the Cloud.

There some interplay with agility and cost. Randy Bias's presentation also mentions the large "insane" cost additions associated with obtaining and provisioning servers inside a large organization (up to 10X the initial cost for a 2 core 2GB rackmount server, he reports). "Internal Cloud" environments address this issue, allowing new virtual servers to be provisioned internally instead, a point also borne out in the Avanade survey:

And many of these deployments are internal cloud. Avanade says that globally, “there is a 2:1 ratio of respondents who prefer SaaS delivered internally (or as private services) versus from third-party service providers. There is an even greater dissparity in the United States, with a 4:1 ratio in favor of internal SaaS deployments.”
http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=3207