However, if an investor had purchased stock in the 30 components of the Dow in 1990 that were all deploying ERP, that investor would have benefited from a 35% decline in General and Administrative costs as a percentage of revenues, a five-fold increase in revenues as automation enabled massive scale, and an almost eight-fold increase in market cap.

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The approach that companies rely upon to operate their IT lacks the integration and automation needed to achieve the full economies of scale cloud computing can deliver.

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Public cloud platforms achieve a lower cost basis by leveraging commodity infrastructure and economies of scale that come through multitenancy, automation, and standardization, he writes in a new post and report.

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The same automation and control that gives organizations the ability to scale up or down using multiple servers when demand increases also allows them to migrate entire server deployments to a new infrastructure when disaster strikes.

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About 750, 000 jobs in IT, finance and business services are expected to be outsourced by 2016, and automation is having a similar cumulative toll, particularly at the lower end of the pay scale, where grocery check-out clerks have been replaced by electronic scanners, and over 250, 000 postal workers have already lost their jobs due to automation of mail processing.

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