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App Dev Today

Last year, I researched the impact of the proliferation of cloud computing on business. I know it sounds like a dry topic, but if you are a CIO or an application development manager, the results can have serious meaning.

Cloud computing has deeply penetrated the enterprise and SMB ranks, and 46.3 percent of respondents said they had four or more cloud applications in use, my partner, Esteban Kolsky, and I discovered. Some have dozens.

That's great for the cloud because it validates what Kolsky and I (and many others) have been saying for more than a decade: The cloud is just flat out a better way to deliver application functionality at a reasonable price to a growing universe of companies.

Of course, there was an underside side to the results as well. With so many cloud apps in use, many IT departments found that one of their major responsibilities had become developing and maintaining integrations among many separate clouds.

The integration technology available today is quite good at making cloud integration straightforward, but it's not free of effort. When something changes in one cloud app, IT staff often are compelled to understand how the change ripples through the rest of the company's cloud infrastructure.