"Berquist said the cloud computing model--of companies' serving
applications over the Internet--requires vendors to spend large
amounts of cash buying and maintaining servers, telecoms
infrastructure and software such as operating systems, Web,
application and database servers to support their software as a
service (SaaS) operation.
"He added because SaaS vendors needed to invest in more hardware
and software than traditional software vendors--where applications
are sold to customers to install on their own machines--there was a
greater drive towards using open source operating systems, Web,
application and database servers, as opposed to more expensive
commercial alternatives."