One possibility I frequently discuss on these pages is that companies will expand their service oriented architecture-based services from internal enterprise services to external services provided to customers and partners.
Essentially, every company can and will become, to some degree, cloud providers.
A new example that drives the point home was recently illustrated by John Adams in BTN. As Adams points out, U.S. Bank "is in the midst of rolling out ScoreBoard, an online reporting
tool that enables businesses to monitor their own spending and compare
card sales data to other firms."
ScoreBoard was developed through a partnership with Visa, internal IT
work and WebFocus, a user interface provided by Information Builders, Adams reports. The service takes three years of historical data with which small business customers can conduct spending and financial performance
analysis.
A service, delivered by an enterprise, to customers, with which they can perform critical analyses of the state of their business. U.S. Bank may not call it cloud computing, but it sure sounds like cloud to me.
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