Bolick and his team shared some lessons learned:

The choice to create its own custom software on top of a cloud infrastructure -- in this case Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) --rather than customize an existing cloud service was a fairly simple decision.

As Aquent discussed its requirements with cloud providers, such as Salesforce, it became evident that Aquent could not provide the same services to its customers that it could with its homegrown ERP solution. On the ERP side, many vendors had no cloud solutions when the company was studying the issues in 2009.

"We asked cloud vendors if they knew anyone running custom ERP packages in a cloud environment and they could find no one," says Zach Hunter, vice president of software development for Aquent. "A lot of vendors could not even spell cloud when we were doing this."