Mr. Fishbein: From a layman's perspective, cloud computing is the ability for companies to be able to deliver applications and content through the Internet. Traditionally, companies would buy servers and buy PCs, and host their applications internally. And now with the advent of cloud computing, companies are now able to actually deliver those applications through the Internet. Cloud computing is a term that is often used or even overused to describe that phenomenon.
TWST: What are some of the key factors that recently created opportunities for cloud computing companies? What are the macro trends or shifts that will impact the space going forward?
Mr. Fishbein: It was kind of opportunistic from the standpoint of - we had an economy that obviously went south starting in 2008, and companies were looking for cheaper means to be able to have IT delivered internally and be able to cut costs. And at the same time, we saw companies emerging in the space that were trying to be able to deliver applications more cheaply to these customers. So we also saw a kind of a perfect storm happen from that perspective. And what we see now is that because companies were trying to cut expenses, they were interested in trying on-demand, or applications that were delivered over the cloud. And since that phenomenon happened, we've seen an upshot or an uptick in that business. And we think that now that economies are improving, people are going to continue to spend money to have their applications delivered more in a cloud environment. And I think the ramification is that some of the legacy providers that are out there that have been using the traditional model, they will be forced to catch up to the cloud providers or they are going to be left behind in terms of a revenue perspective.
Tickers included in this excerpt: AMZN, BMC, CA, CRM, CTXS, CVLT, DELL, GOOG, HPQ, IBM, MFE, MSFT, ORCL, SFSF, SYMC, VMW
For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.

