For managers who are wrestling with business transformation brought on the advent of the cloud computing model, Tim Chou offers seven ways to get into the cloud.

Chou, the author of "The End of Software: Transforming Your Business for the On Demand Future," a lecturer at Stanford University and a former president of Oracle On Demand, says managers can pinpoint specific technology areas that are gaining traction in a cloud model.

"Each one of you may be pushed on the question of what is our cloud strategy," Chou says in this COMDEXvirtual presentation.

Continue on and see Chou's recommendations for getting to the cloud and see where you might fit in.

The next generation of network cloud services is characterized by lower cost and higher power than previous corporate networks, Chou says.

"Nobody buys their own corporate network service anymore. They are all using cloud networks," Chou said. "We all buy network services from a variety of service providers both nationally and internationally. We are all consuming network cloud services. All of the business and consumer applications use network cloud services."

"The network guys realized they had to put their switches and routers in rooms, which were cold and had guard dogs outside," Chou said. "They had high-quality servers, so they thought, 'Why not put storage in there as well?'"

"By the late 1990s and early 2000s, the whole data center/cloud service business began to evolve," he said. "It became a place where you focus on delivering high-power, high-security and storage. Many of the network cloud service companies bought some of the power play, for example Savvis and Terremark as they move to into the data center cloud service business. But building these is not cheap."

"What kicked cloud into high gear was [Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff] Bezos saying he would sell compute and storage. People thought he was crazy, but now it's widely believed this business is over $1 billion. While certain people might need a certain business application, everybody needs compute and storage."

Chou said virtualization is required but it's an established, well-known technology that is not too difficult to manage. The demand for cloud compute and storage services is apparent.

"At this point in time, if you walked into any startup that thinks they are going to be the next Facebook or the next Groupon, they are all building in compute and cloud storage networks."

"There is a whole new generation of software development and cloud services emerging," Chou said. "People have strategically observed that the last time around in the client-server era, the guy that won the software developer won the war. So this is a very strategic ground."

"NetSuite, Salesforce are doing it," he said. "There's going to be a lot of activity," he added. "If you haven't looked at this stuff, I would highly recommend that you consider starting to consider building new applications in these environments."

"Whether I have an existing, conventional Siebel, PeopleSoft, or Oracle application or a next-gen application, I'm going to manage the security availability and the performance of those applications," Chou said.

The days of buying conventional software and loading it on servers are over.

"Now a new generation has emerged," Chou said. "An example of this is that once upon a time, if you built website, you needed spam filtering, but now you buy it from Postini or MegLabs. This applies across the board [to other types of operations management]."

"Almost every vendor is offering software-as-a-service," Chou said. "You can go back to your vendor and say, 'Will you manage the software you sell me?'"

Salesforce and Adobe are examples of vendors offering this service.

IT Managers will have to imagine what cloud services will become.

To help think of the possibilities, Chou said to consider what could be done using one server for 3.5 years.

Change the equation and think of using 10,000 servers for 35 minutes in the cloud. The usage possibilities are endless.