The impact of cloud infrastructures on business value: a qualitative analysis

The interpretation of organizations like dynamic entities imposes some fun-damental challenges for today managers. Firms have not derived value simp-ly by linking IT to their business processes: they have learned how to benefit from IT by developing a competency in creating and evolving an IT architec-ture, able to identify and implement the organization’s strategic objectives. Cloud computing represents a possible answer to companies’ needs of flexi-bility, giving them the chance to implement new services more quickly than the past and without expensive capital investments. The aim of this work is to analyze the impact of cloud on value creation opportunities for compa-nies that decide to migrate their IT infrastructure toward the on demand model. The assumption that similar choices, from a technological point of view, can imply various value expectations has been attested through the cross-analysis of two companies that both chose public cloud, but starting from deeply different motivations