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Technology types have been talking about "the cloud" for quite some time, but the term has gone mainstream in recent months. The problem is that not everyone has the same definition or understanding of what it means. A recent Wall Street Journal article emphasizes the confusion with a quote from Oracle's Larry Ellison, "I have no idea what anyone is talking about. It's really just complete gibberish."

While Larry was aiming for high drama, the ambiguity surrounding the term is caused in large part by a rush of companies co-opting the term "cloud" to apply to a very general definition that encompasses any system that processes and serves up information from a separate location. Defined broadly in this way, the Internet is in the Cloud, as is any type of Software as a Service (SaaS) arrangement. However, the current buzz isn't around either of these topics (companies like Salesforce.com have been doing SaaS for years), it's around "Cloud Computing."

Companies with enormous computing infrastructures (e.g. Amazon.com) have begun allowing other businesses to ultilize these systems for their own computing needs, which introduces a new and flexible model for deploying technology. Using virtualization technology, these cloud computing providers enable any company to provision a piece of their IT infrastructure and immediately deploy technology in an extremely reliable, flexible and infinitely scalable environment.

In the world of email marketing, that means that companies can now migrate from expensive and inflexible email service providers to a dedicated email marketing application that they own, and that runs in the cloud. As a result, companies get a powerful, future-proof solution that combines the cost benefits of a software solution with the ease of ownership of a SaaS solution.

In addition to enabling technology ownership without any onsite IT resources, cloud computing by design offers a scalable environment that you can expand or contract as your business needs dictate. This flexibility gives you the power to only pay for what you need at any given point of time.

StrongMail is proud to be the first and only email marketing solutions provider to offer its software via a licensed model in the cloud. Unlike traditional ESPs, StrongMail offers a dedicated email marketing solution that is perfectly suited to take advantage of cloud computing. For maximum flexibility, StrongMail can be deployed fully in the cloud or even "split" so that sensitive data is kept behind the firewall while email delivery and management takes advantage of the full resources of cloud computing. In fact, in 2008, Gartner Research predicted that "The use of on-premise technology in conjunction with cloud-based technologies and platforms will extend what is possible using the cloud," and that's exactly what StrongMail has done.

Whether you take advantage of cloud computing for email marketing or any other application, this new model gives companies a compelling way to leverage technology in a way that's best for their business. If you're interested in learning more about the benefits of applying cloud computing to email marketing, please contact us at (650) 421-4200.