Sandra Gittlen

Worldwide revenue from cloud services is expected to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, according to IDC. With a compound annual growth rate of 27.4%, the cloud is set for quite a trajectory.

Despite this anticipated rise, many organizations still have substantial in-house infrastructure that has to be managed as well. This seesaw of internal and external services has created a hybrid environment. And CFOs must work to keep it stabilized.

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) CIO Tom Conophy has no reservations when it comes to the cloud.

The hospitality giant, which manages, franchises or leases 4,500 hotels in 100 countries, has been able to improve the customer experience and reduce costs by moving storage and in-house applications for mobile phones to multiple data centers in the cloud. It's been such a success overall that the team is now rebuilding its room-reservations system, which processes more than 345 million transactions daily, for a move to the cloud.

Paul Aldridge, CIO of Genomic Health, Inc., wanted his technology team fully focused on supporting a next-generation network for cancer research. Yet with each user requiring logins for as many as a dozen software-as-a-service (SaaS) sites, password management such as lookups and resets were chewing up their time.

Genomic, based in Redwood City, Calif., is a firm believer in SaaS, subscribing to applications for performance reviews, expense reporting, payroll, employee benefits, vacation time tracking, customer relationship management, and more. "We're in the cancer diagnostics business, not back-office services. We use SaaS so IT can concentrate on things that are of value to us," he says.

Want to save your company $314 million a year with a relatively simple change? According to the Hackett Group global advisory firm, it could be done just by sharing your back-office functions.

"As companies become more complex, they have a tradition of organizing work on a vertical," Honorio Padron, Hackett's managing director and practice leader for global business services, says in an interview. Inefficient processes and waste are the fallout of this approach. The company's research has produced numerous recommendations about how firms can achieve big savings. But talking to Padron really fills out the recommendations.

If you want to know what IT tools and technologies you'll be using in a few years, it pays to keep an eye on startups that are focused on enterprise technologies.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs agree that the IT startups that get funding these days are those whose offerings cut costs, relieve headaches and generally make CIOs' lives easier -- without capital investments in software and supporting infrastructure. Investors are backing startups that aim to do just that with systems that handle tasks like IT resource tracking, cloud storage, virtualization and mobile device management.

If you want to know what IT tools and technologies you'll be using in a few years, it pays to keep an eye on enterprise technology start-ups.

Seasoned VCs and entrepreneurs agree that IT start-ups looking for funding should have an offering that makes the CIO's life easier -- and it had better not involve lots of capital investments on software installations and supporting infrastructure. Instead, backers are looking for software-as-a-service, cloud-based and mobile innovations that improve the IT cost proposition.

Until a few years ago, Thule Group's North American division would have been considered a "classic spreadsheet-driven" company, according to Vice President of Finance Mark Cohen.

"We had one person in accounting who kept all the data as up to date as possible, including departmental expenses that outlined the costs of running the factory. However, it wasn't unusual for it to take a week to consolidate cross-company information, and it wasn't unusual to discover that what managers were looking at wasn't the final spreadsheet," Cohen says.

Old ways of working with spreadsheets are giving way to a broad range of online software and services meant to either extend the capabilities of basic spreadsheet programs or to obviate the need for them.

The new tools add sharing, automation and data analysis functions to existing spreadsheet applications. Some customers are turning to other tools, including CRM and analytics software, to supplement or replace their spreadsheets.

As oil prices continue to fluctuate, the economy flounders and the pressure is on to slow global warming, both public- and private-sector organizations are turning to alternative work schedules such as telecommuting, flex time and four-day workweeks to ease the pain to their bottom lines, their employees' wallets and the environment.

For example, the state of Utah recently announced a one-year trial of a four-day workweek where most non-essential services are shut down on Fridays to save more than US$3 million in utility costs. Across the country, other organizations, such as the Hawaiian state government, have disclosed similar plans as well as telecommuting initiatives and flex-time to reduce carbon emissions, give employees a break from crushing gas prices and possibly cut down on expenses.