Does Cloud Computing Require A New Type of ROI Measure?

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Companies are less concerned about measuring return on investment (ROI) for cloud computing engagements. Is that a good thing? A new survey of 350 senior IT executives finds 16 percent see measuring ROI as a hurdle to their cloud computing implementations, down from 34 percent in a similar survey from a year ago.

The survey, released by Unisys and conducted by IDG Research, finds more than 50 percent of IT leaders at organizations with more than 1,000 employees indicated that they have at least one application or a portion of their organization’s IT infrastructure in the cloud. Overall, about 26 percent of their enterprise information currently resides in a private cloud environment and that they expect that percentage to grow to about 32 percent in the next 18 months…

Why the reduced emphasis on ROI in cloud efforts? Is it because more organizations have figured it out, or does cloud require new or different ways to measure value to the business? As Gartner’s Daryl Plummer said here at Forbes.com a while back, the tried-and-true ROI formulas developed in the past may not be the best measure for cloud success. “ROI is usually a measure of hard monetary return on the use of products or services,” he wrote. “The soft side of ROI is almost always underplayed or ignored entirely. However, with cloud computing, stipulating that a hard-money ROI will be achieved, in the form of savings, is likely to net you more heartache than cost break.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2014/04/02/does-cloud-computing-require-a-new-type-of-roi/

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