Will companies base all their information systems needs on clouds? Amazon provides a service called S3 to meet all data storage needs. For server capacity they have their EC2 cloud. Higher up in the stack, we have Salesforce.com's AppExchange. Many companies support needs in the application layer by providing software as a service. In addition to this, we have the emergence of mashups as a way to meet information system needs.One can even depend on the cloud for their R&D and services needs by using
Innocentive or
Mechanical Turk.
This approach makes sense strategically. Companies can focus on their core business and allow the experts to deal with infrastructure, applications and services. The main uncertainty here is the ecosystem. While companies may find a layer or two that meets the needs, can they get an end-to-end solution?