IT Channel Insight has just released its “2012 Cloud Leaders” report, which highlights the growing role of cloud computing in enterprise IT innovation strategies—as well as its value as a way to manage costs and adaptively handle compute workloads that have become increasingly volatile.

The report highlights the internal use of the cloud by CA Technologies. The pooling of global development resources into the CA “Labs on Demand” resource has created a private cloud that saved the company approximately $4 million—or about 25 years of developer time.

The Labs on Demand cloud does more than just save money, though. By freeing up developer time, Labs on Demand has helped CA Technologies speed up the development cycle and respond more quickly to customer demand, which we expect will boost our competitive advantage.

This is an important point for business customers and channel partners alike to consider. The cloud is not just about reducing the cost of IT resources by leveraging cloud providers’ economies of scale—although that certainly is a benefit. But in today’s fast-moving markets where the innovative use of applications and data often spells the difference between being an industry leader or being disrupted right out of existence, the cloud is rapidly becoming an essential means for quickly creating competitively differentiated value.

In fact, companies that fail to embrace the cloud because of perceived risks and ramp-up costs are likely to expose themselves to a risk that is even greater than any of those associated with cloud adoption: irrelevance. That’s why CA Technologies is committed to delivering the technologies our customers and partners need as they leverage the cloud to boost cost-efficiency, achieve greater business agility and accelerate the pace of IT-enabled business innovation.