As we often see, virtualization can be the stepping stone to cloud computing. And with virtualization, comes the opportunity for some true CAPEX savings. Not only do these savings help fund cloud computing initiatives, they also relieve some of the pressure to focus purely on cost-savings as the ultimate goal of the cloud. As I've said before, the main value of cloud computing is really around agility and time-to-market. And it's important to have realistic expectations when beginning the journey.

Over at Qualcomm, IT Senior Director Matthew Clark and his team recognized this from the onset:

Why is Qualcomm pursuing cloud computing?

"Qualcomm started virtualizing its infrastructure in 2002. We've already realized great savings in hardware costs from those efforts. That's why the decision to move to full-fledged cloud computing wasn't driven from an expectation of cost savings. We had already extracted those savings from virtualization. The move to cloud, instead, was because we knew that cloud computing would help us streamline our processes so we could get to market faster than the competition."

Now that Qualcomm is well underway with their cloud computing initiatives, they have been able to improve the agility of their business by significantly accelerating the delivery of their IT services.

"Now that we've implemented cloud computing, our application developers and our engineering teams can provision systems far more quickly. They don't have to call anybody or create a ticket. It's all done behind the scenes and it's more than four times faster than the manual processes we used to follow. We're able to reduce our development cycles by up to 60 days when you look at the time it would take to purchase, procure, and go through the approval cycles of getting hardware, and then finally install and configure it."

Watch this short video to learn more about Qualcomm and how the cloud helped them get to market faster than the competition. And visit the Cloud Luminaries site for more on their story and other organizations who are paving the way in cloud.