Cloud Computing: Making Rain From Blue-Sky Thinking
Microsoft cloud solutions help customers cut costs, generate new revenue streams and provide added services to end users.
REDMOND, Wash. — March 3, 2011 — This week’s edition of Businessweek includes a story about the shift taking place in the development and deployment of applications and services by using cloud computing to cut costs, streamline IT management and respond more quickly to changes in end-user demand. Microsoft is cited as one of the companies taking the lead in this area and in moving organizations from their existing operations and services to the cloud and taking advantage of increased efficiency and new opportunities along the way.
3M’s Visual Attention Service (VAS) is a Web-based scanning tool that digitally evaluates the impact of creative and graphic designs and provides a map to help guide the design process. 3M made the VAS globally available to its customers by hosting it on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.
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To be sure, the economic gains that are possible through cloud computing are significant – one customer saw a reduction in IT management costs by three-quarters, in part from moving to Windows Azure. But cloud computing has the potential to expand beyond the realm of budget line items to that of lines of software code, creating new tools and services that lead to new computing experiences, expanded business opportunities, better services for customers, and, ultimately, new jobs and economic growth.
Intellectual Property = Business Opportunity
Minnesota-based 3M is perhaps best known for its ubiquitous Post-it products, but since being founded in 1902, the company has developed more than 40 different technology platforms through a commitment to scientific research. And 3M has more than 7,000 employees who are dedicated solely to research in a range of areas.
For example, 3M vision scientists have studied how the human brain processes visual information. Out of that they developed complex algorithms for predicting for more go here
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