Plans to use public clouds have been announced by major software companies, including Box, Salesforce, NetSuite, Tableau, Data, Workday, and SAP.
What is a public cloud? Also called Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), a public cloud is a data center owned and operated by a single company which rents out servers, storage, and networking to others companies in need. 
Box and Workday → AWS and IBM SoftLayer
Salesforce → AWS
NetSuite → Microsoft Azure
JDA Software → Google Cloud Platform
It seems the trend is revealing a shift in software power to fewer (but larger) data centers. This way software companies can really focus on their core competencies.
Shifting to public clouds with large geographic coverage can prove to be a major advantage, especially considering the variation of strict data laws across countries. There are huge cost-savings opportunities with public clouds.
Although some large software companies still believe a “private cloud” model to be best, public clouds are definitely something to think about..
Full article: http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/data-center-consolidation-cloud/
