For any Internet driven business, rapid growth can place severe strains on the computing infrastructure and internal applications. In-house infrastructure and self hosted business applications can potentially slow growth because they cannot be expanded quickly enough to keep up with growing demand or even reverse growth when expansion cannot be achieved because of lack of funds. So when a new company that is widely recognised as the achieves the growth it has, it is interesting to consider what infrastructure and applications have helped it achieve this growth.

This company is Groupon, a daily offer site that now operates in 250 markets with 35 million users, having started from scratch in 2008. Key to achieving this growth has been a scalable computing infrastructure built on cloud computing. Groupon chose a Salesforce.com powered backend that enables deals to be entered. Chatter, the Salesforce.com cloud based collaboration tool is used by Groupon staff to comment and discuss deals before they are launched in the most effect manner deemed possible. The Groupon Website is deployed on Amazon AWS scalable EC2 infrastructure enabling it to adjust seamlessly to demand. The anywhere access of the cloud is enabling Groupon sales representatives to enter new deals via mobile devices at face to face meetings held at customer premises, the contracts being digitally signed. Closing the deal in this way is so effective.

When teaching the , impressive case studies always help to illustrate the power of the cloud. What the Groupon story highlights is that innovate businesses can be driven by innovative IT solutions that have a capacity to grow as fast as the new business. Cloud computing has enabled Groupon to grow in this incredible way and with the costs involved proportional to usage did not require a large amount of upfront investment. What is impressive is that Groupon has used a number of different cloud computing services, from different vendors to support their growth. If you would like to know more about Cloud Computing and how it can help your organisation, why not consider attending the .The course introduces all the different cloud computing services and how they can benefit your organisation regardless of its size.