Nobody asked about return on investment during the American Revolution. Specific cloud implementations may fail or succeed. In my research on cloud ROI for our upcoming InformationWeek Analytics report, I haven’t yet found an end user that has put together a stringent return-on-investment analysis using discounted cash flow techniques. I also spoke to a bunch of cloud providers during my research. Moorman said that the enterprise users that he speaks to are chiefly focused on how organizations look at adding cloud computing to the mix of what they’re doing today in a safe way, rather than “having a big TCO debate.” He rightly points out that IT budgets and ROI studies can be maneuvered in much the same way that statistics can be — you can tell just about any story you want to if you frame it right. Crenshaw told me, “We don’t really recommend that customers do a pie-in-the-sky model that shows that IT costs are going to drop 50-60%” because, he says, “maybe it’s credible, maybe it’s not.”