The excitement and buzz around cloud computing touts lower costs, simplified deployments, and flexibility as significant business benefits, all of which are well founded.  However, cloud computing delivers another significant benefit for IT vendors, especially for vendors like CA that offer both on-premises and cloud-based applications.  This benefit is the ability to deliver real-time visibility into product usage and activities.

One of product management's biggest challenges is understanding which features and components of individual products are being used by individual customers.  This challenge exists when you have just a handful of deployed customers, but it gets considerably harder once customer deployments number in the hundreds (or in the case of many CA Security products, the thousands).  As a former product manager, I can confirm that understanding all the use cases across the entire customer base was always a challenge, especially when it came time to design the new release.  And while the 80/20 rule often holds in enterprise software (80% of customer base rely on 20% of product's features), it is often difficult to know which 20% they are actually using.  Although questions, surveys and open dialogues can assist greatly at gathering this intelligence, the reality is that it is always hard to get the full picture.

Cloud computing offers unprecedented visibility into application usage for product managers and development teams unlike.  With this usage data, IT vendors can easily observe which features and capabilities are getting the most use.  This in turn allows for better and faster product development for both the on-premises and cloud-based version of the application.

Even if your organization is not ready for cloud-based services, partnering with a vendor who offers both cloud based and on-premises applications is essential.  Working with such a vendor means that you can expect product capabilities that are well aligned with customer's evolving requirements as the vendor leverages that usage intelligence into new product releases.  In this model, cloud computing offers considerable benefits to IT vendors and customers alike.