CornerStone Telephone Blog Looking forward to hosted services

During a recent cloud services event, discussion turned to what the next five years will look like in cloud computing. My thoughts went first to customer need. CornerStone has been bringing hosted services to business customers since 2003, back then by partnering with Application Service Providers and hosting companies to sell their solutions. Once we saw the benefits early adopters realized - using technology they wouldn't have otherwise been able to support or afford - we were hooked.So, what does the past have to do with a perspective on the next five years and on customer needs? I'm not caught in the trap Springsteen sings about in "Glory Days", but I do have insight from years of experience with delivering solutions that help organizations expand their lines of business, extend beyond their geographic reach, and improve their communications both with employees and with their highly-prized customer base.To avoid the curse-of-the-long blog, I'll post thoughts on future of hosting over the course of the next few days. More than just early adopters: Business owners and IT teams who were early adopters have become evangelists now that they're far enough along the adoption curve. Word-of-mouth is powerful. These evangelists have paved the way for the early majority to join in on realizing the benefits cloud solutions offer - such as lowering total cost of ownership of computing resources and freeing up IT teams to focus on technology that supports core competencies and competitive differentiators. And, of course, huge marketing spends by industry giants is encouraging the early majority to trust and deploy cloud solutions.