With a global operation, latency in the cloud starts to matter tremendously.

"It becomes very difficult or nearly impossible to use a real-time application a continent away," says Mark Parsons, a lead developer with Distributed Logic, who worked on the Aquent project.

While the company has a standard three instances of its ERP system in the Americas, European and Asian markets, the flexibility of the cloud allows the company to add new instances as needed. It will likely add a fourth instance on the U.S. West Coast and may expand with a Japanese instance, says Aquent's Hunter.

Selecting Amazon as its cloud infrastructure provider allowed the company to quickly spin up new instances even in countries where the communications infrastructure and language are different.