Among companies larger than 1,000 employees, about five percent use cloud computing services, according to a market-survey report Staten conducted and plans to publish early in the first quarter of next year. Among small- and mid-sized companies only about two percent are currently using cloud services, according to Staten's data.

Dumping Legacy Code and Hardware Chores

Cost will get a company into the cloud-computing arena, Swartz says, but convenience and reliability are what will keep Preferred Hotels in it, at least. Being able to rely on Terremark to maintain the hardware is a big step. Being able to call up a configuration screen in a Web browser to raise or lower the amount of processing power, memory and disk space each virtual server gets lets Swartz tune performance as much as necessary, to keep his users happy.

The company uses software to virtualize its desktop applications onto Terremark's servers, so performance tuning can be a big deal. Putting Citrix on top of virtualized servers drags performance down a certain degree, because every request from the application has to go through two layers of control software to get to the processors. To compensate, Swartz increased the number of Citrix servers from five to seven when he set up the Terremark deal. So far, there have been few problems, he says.

All the company's standard commercial applications have run fine during the two months Preferred has been testing the cloud-based system. Now the company is gradually shifting all its homegrown legacy applications over to the new servers, even as it works on a CRM implementation that will replace much of the legacy code, Swartz says.