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Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services.

If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet. Cloud? That's not new; it's a new name.

We've been delivering cloud-based services for over a decade, with more than 30 million Intuit customers using offerings across a variety of desktop and mobile devices. The benefits are clear: online experiences are simply better for customer.

We started about three years before YouTube existed, so we had to host all the videos on our own servers at a co-location facility. When we got so many hits on our first few videos, and we estimated our bandwidth bill was going to be about $12,000 a month, we knew that we had to establish a business model ASAP.

If someone asks me what cloud computing is, I try not to get bogged down with definitions. I tell them that, simply put, cloud computing is a better way to run your business.

The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it's a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare.

Cloud computing means you are doing your computing on somebody else's computer. Looking ahead a little, I firmly believe cloud - previously called grid computing - will become very widespread. It's much cheaper than buying your own computing infrastructure, or maybe you don't have the power to do what you want on your own computer.

If we as a society do not understand 'the cloud,' in all its aspects - what data it holds, how it works, what the bargains are we make as we engage with it, we'll all be the poorer for it, I believe.

Cloud is just emerging, but it's high growth.

Cloud represents the maturation of the IT industry.