VirtuStream's service contract allows Diesel Direct to set a relatively high average baseline, then change its top capacity demand limit as often as it wants--every day if that's what works for the customer, which in the case of Diesel Direct it very much does, Callow says.

On high-volume days, Callow says, adding capacity is as easy as changing a configuration screen; so is reducing capacity when the spike disappears.

Those changes save Diesel Direct both money and time. Rather than running reports and invoices all night Tuesdays, for example, the additional capacity lets the company run those resource-intensive processes during the day rather than overnight. That gets critical work done faster and more accurately than a process left to complete itself unattended.

There are limits on the capacity even of the weekly bursts Callow scheduled, but there is no comparison in speed and power to what came before.

The benefits from dynamic capacity management and professional management are "a perfect example of why people are going to embrace cloud computing even in $300 million non-tech-focused companies," Golden says. "They don't want to spend a lot of money on IT, don't have the budget to do best-practice on-premise kinds of things, so being able to leverage another company's resources on their behalf (VirtuStream) is a big win right there."