Abstract :
Summary form only given. In the last 5 years, the availability of Cloud-based Platforms and Infrastructure radically transformed the IT industry in general and Software Engineering practices in particular. The benefits of these technologies are twofold: they improve efficiency of Software Lifecycle Management by reducing time-to-market and total cost of ownership, and they enable the creation of different types of application architectures, leveraging the scalability and elasticity provided by the Cloud. This keynote will discuss the impact and benefits of Cloud-based Platforms and Infrastructure, and will show how specific organisations have leveraged them to deliver solutions that would have otherwise been impossible.