This IDC study presents data from IDC's 2012 CloudTrack Survey relating to customer perceptions of the economic value of moving to public cloud services. In line with IDC's predictions, the vast majority of ISVs will employ some form of cloud (public cloud technologies including SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and private cloud), with 94.8% of respondents believing that they will employ some form of cloud services in their organization, and about 64% of those respondents believing they will use some form of public cloud service. 85% of the respondents marked cost-related efficiencies as the most important benefit to cloud deployment.

According to Connor G. Sullivan, associate research analyst in IDC's SaaS and Cloud Software research practice, "Economic benefits of cloud will continue to be the number 1 driver of adoption through 2016 for most companies. There are numerous perceived soft benefits to deploying cloud solutions — improved collaboration, reduction in time to market, and improved agility around applications, infrastructure, and platforms — but we expect the hard benefit of up-front capital cost savings in the form of reduced equipment, software licenses, datacenter utilities, and IT staff costs to still carry the most weight for the CTO, CIO, CMO, and CEO decision makers."