A big challenge for software industry today is how to provide better Return on Investment (ROI) to its customers. After the dotcom market downturn in 2000, the old model of developing and selling software with large up-front payments has been finding difficulties in convincing large and medium-sized corporate customers to acquire additional enterprise software licenses. Overall cost of software and hardware maintenance, support, and ongoing operations is so high that many companies have difficulties justifying any new investment in information technology.

To break the impasse, leading vendors of information technology and related services are rapidly embarking on a new paradigm. That new model is often called cloud computing, or sometimes, Software as a Service (SaaS). Cloud computing enables value added enterprise computing services to be provided to customers across the Internet.

Cloud computing lowers the ownership cost because of its lack of up-front license and infrastructure fees, and much faster implementations since there is no on-premise development and deployment. It also provides advantages for vendors since vendors spend less time managing software and more time supporting customers. The main reason for that is fully reusable and scalable software that is running on single platform. Small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford large IT expenditures are very open to cloud computing. Even some large enterprises are realizing that benefits of cloud computing are real and significant. Leaders of the pack among Fortune 500 are increasingly considering cloud computing as their future enterprise computing paradigm.

A key enabler of cloud computing paradigm is a versatile universal virtual business process platform where value added services can be designed, tested, released and provisioned to many customers on a continual 7/24 global support basis.

Semantion is one of the first vendors that has enabled virtualization of business process management, what is a basis for enterprise application of cloud computing. The way how Semantion software is virtualized provides a breakthrough solution that not only improves efficiency of old in-house software model but also opens unique cloud computing opportunity in the area of modeling and automating business processes.