Boston companies embracing the cloud

According to a recent Boston Herald article, companies located in the historic capital of Massachusetts are joining the cloud computing adoption trend.

Boston is actually home to many service providers, with some, such as NaviSite, EMC and Akamai, headquartered there, while others, such as Cisco and Box.net, conducting local operations in the area.

According to Larry Bohn, the managing director of General Catalyst Partners, based in Cambridge, many companies are now "orienting their future strategies around the cloud as the central focal point for IT."

The article states that market estimates for the managed IT service range from between $9.2 billion globally for business-to-business service to $50 billion for the inclusion of consumer services.

Bohn forecasts the technology to see even further increases and improvements as more companies utilize it.

"In the early-stage venture market, almost all of the companies that you see today now use cloud computing ... as their back-end infrastructure," said Bohn. "And this enables them to bring products to market at dramatically lower costs than previously. It means they don’t need to raise as much capital."

Osterman Research estimates that companies currently in the cloud will further their investments during 2011, increasing their budget for the technology by 10 percent.