Well, ignoring what Larry Ellison and Richard Stallman think about it, Cloud Computing will be "the" technology that gets Wall Street and other IT organizations out of the “Recession of 2008” and it will be "the" ultimate cost-cutting solution for every IT organization around the world, small or large.

Small: We recently moved our mid size blog site from five Dell blades which were housed in the data center of a hosting company to the Amazon Cloud, simply and smoothly. Never mind the actual cost we initially paid for the hardware and we won't have in the future, guess what happened to our $1,700 per month hosting fees? Went down to pennies overnight!

I was at the 6^th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo this week, which took place in San Jose, California and among many great sessions packed in three days (this conference is growing and getting better every year by the way) , I attended a Cloud session presented by Jeff Barr. Jeff is a well-known evangelist at Amazon on its Web Services team and a frequent AJAXWorld speaker. His session entitled "Cloud Computing & AJAX" was presented at the conference as one of the preview sessions of SYS-CON’s upcoming Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com), another recession-saving three-day event, which will take place November 19-21, 2008, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA.

Large: Here is what prompted me to think that Cloud Computing will be the most critical IT tool for financial firms to get through this recession. Next to me in Jeff’s session was a delegate representing a financial consulting firm whose IT solutions are often used by companies such as Charles Schwab, HSBC, Fidelity Investments, Bank of America, Citibank, you get it. David, a software development manager at his firm, and I had a brief conversation during the coffee break, his eyes wide open in a ‘Eureka’ moment.

Jeremy Geelan, conference chair of SYS-CON's upcoming Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, with Cloud Computing Bootcamp announcement sign this week at AXAXWorld Conference & Expo, in San Jose, California. The three-day Cloud event will also take place at the beautiful Fairmont Hotel, downtown San Jose.

He told me: “that’s it, this (Cloud Computing) is what will take my company through the recession. We sell software to financial clients, our number-crunching solution generally requires a couple of million dollars in hardware investment even before our clients spend a single dime on our software which shoots down many deals for us. Cloud Computing takes the entire ‘hardware cost’ our of the picture. There is no hardware cost any longer, just pennies to the dollar, by making what we offer affordable and easy to justify!”

As David and I said farewell to the conference (Jeff’s session was on the third and last day of AJAXWorld) we both took the same redeye back to New York City, and landed at JetBlue’s brand new Terminal 5 at JFK, one of the first passengers who arrived. The new Terminal 5 looks very impressive.