And the cloud, whether private, public or a hybrid, is there to support IT as a service for businesses, Tucci said, noting that in 2009, for the first time, more applications were deployed on virtual servers than physical.

Cloud computing solves a myriad of problems, not the least of which is enterprises' operating expenditures on maintenance of underlying infrastructure. On average, Tucci said, 67% of IT budgets are spent on maintenance, while only 27% goes to innovation or creating value for the business. By turning toward commodity hardware with virtualization, grid computing and business intelligence on top of it, those routine expenses can be reduced and applications shared across virtual data centers.

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