Need a pair of shoes, an airline ticket, or a book? Looking for 100 servers to get you through an online sales rush? No problem. Go online and your needs are (nearly) instantaneously fulfilled. Instant gratification may be the single greatest driver in the revolution that is fueled by virtualization and the delivery of software and services from the cloud. The impact is only beginning to be understood. Some obvious advantages are driving cloud-based development, such as eliminating the expense and endless cycle of procurement and upgrading of a long list of IT solutions, and the never-ending fight for priority with IT to move an innovation forward. The cloud provides a world in which the end user has complete control over their client/server, web-based, and computing solutions – allowing them to choose what they use, where they use it, and where they get solutions from. It is the culmination of a 25-year end-user computing revolution that began with the introduction of the PC. Each phase of this revolution has created terrific efficiency gains and cost reductions for businesses, moving from the mainframe to the PC, from the PC to client/server, to the web and now to the cloud.

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