Aaron Levie, Box.net's CEO and co-founder, said the company looks for cloud-based applications for everything, especially for standard IT needs. "We want to free up resources to solve the higher-order issues around technology," Levie said.

This has also allowed Box.net to grow its staff very rapidly, sometimes doubling it from one year to the next, without having to hold back for fear of having its IT infrastructure buckle or collapse. "One of the breaking points when an organization grows like this is that their IT infrastructure begins to have challenges. We try to remove as many of those kinds of limits as possible from how quickly we can grow," Levie said.

Like Box.net, Zendesk also uses a broad array of cloud applications and IT services, and that has allowed the 70-employee company to not even have one person devoted exclusively to IT.

"The reason why we can do that is because of the technology choices we've made, because of the cloud," Urlocker said. "We run most of our business off of hosted, cloud-based software."

In addition to using its own cloud-based application, Zendesk also uses business software from Box.net, Google, Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Yammer, in addition to Skype for most of its voice communications.