Brokerage, conference fees and selling products and services to money managers were the treasured business lines.

FORBES: SEC Scrutiny of Pension Consultants: A Call To Action (February 28, 2004 )

Similarly, managers are also scratching their heads at a financial services business where the new HR approach puts responsibility for the hiring process on them.

FORBES: What Happened to Human Resources?

The expansion looks set to continue, according to this week's purchasing managers' services index, which recorded a sharp increase in business activity in January.

ECONOMIST: Why the Bank has raised rates despite low inflation

Managers looking to plan business processes or add new functionality now have much more choice among the many services coming online.

FORBES: Increasingly, Clouds Are Built the Open Source Way

And the big private services sector is also in dire straits: purchasing managers reported a record contraction in activity, new business and employment in November.

ECONOMIST: The banking crisis is blunting the effect of rate cuts

Sundararajan (associate professor of Information, Operations and Management Services at the NYU Stern School of Business) and two colleagues surveyed 23 CIOs and high-level IT managers at U.S. and Canadian companies that use or have evaluated use of cloud services.

FORBES: How to Tell If Your Company is Ready for the Cloud