Whatever trends are emerging, fading or in full swing, there are more than enough experts to declare, debunk or deny their existence. The fun part is not necessarily wading through all the contradicting opinions to select the one that represents the closest thing to reality, but waiting 12 months or so and watching them all say they were correct in how things actually turned out.

In the last 12 months the tech industry has crowned the latest trend and named it “cloud computing.” Nearly anyone that has access to the Internet has an opinion, definition or prediction about what cloud computing is and what it potentially means to business, government or humanity as a whole.

While these musings range from purely entertaining to positively absurd it seems a more prudent course to focus on the value individuals and organization can derive from adopting these technologies.

More than ever, an enterprise of more than 5 people purchases something for the business for only one reason: to increase profits. This ultimate goal can be realized in 2 and only 2 fundamental ways: lower costs or increase sales.If your technology purveyor of choice cannot demonstrate to you in concrete terms how their offering will do one or both of those items, politely but quickly show them the door and tell them to take their PowerPoint slides with them.

So here are 3 of the most prominent cloud terms with a brief definition, along with a value proposition for increasing revenue, lowering costs or both.

Software as a Service (SaaS): A specific business application ranging from personal productivity (MS Office) to sales force automation to financial management running on and from a remote data center owned and managed by a third party. That third party can be the application provider (Salesforce.com) or a partnership of the application provider and a hosting company (LongJump and Rackspace.)

The specific business value is derived from the amount of time it takes to get a SaaS application up and running (typically 30% to 70% shorter); the amount of money it costs to buy software licenses, servers, load balancers etc. and hire an army of skilled consultants to properly implement the application (typically 50% less); and, the disruption of business operations every time a patch, update or upgrade comes out in the complex interconnections between hardware and software systems.

SaaS applications are typically updated 3 to 4 times per year with scheduled downtime of 2 hours or less on the weekend without affecting existing customizations or interfaces. This compares quite favorably to the effort it takes to go from any application of an enterprise suite.

Platform as a Service (PaaS): This is an approach that allows the rapid design, development and deployment of enterprise-grade applications running on and from a remote data center owned and managed by a third party.

As with SaaS the third party can be a single or multiple entities depending on the platform. The specific business value of this approach is derived from eliminating the redundancy enterprises must build into their infrastructure to support applications that serve a specific set of users to perform a specific set of tasks or functions.

This redundancy comes in the form of duplicate data, application functionality, server hardware, system interfaces, bandwidth and personnel.

Platform as a Service providers — including Microsoft Azure, Force.com and LongJump — provide organizations with the necessary tools to rapidly build applications with a common user experience and deploy them on a robust infrastructure without the hassles of long procurement cycles and even longer configuration and customization cycles.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This set of services was made popular by, of all things, a bookseller. Amazon was trying to figure out what to do with their extra infrastructure so they decided to put a web front-end on it and sold it “by the drink.”

By making this raw compute and storage utility available, individuals and companies alike can rent these resources to store files, backup email servers, run applications or perform calculations for as long or as short as they desire.

The value of these services is that businesses can pay for exactly what they need when they need it. The reason that this is so important is that most servers are only used at 20% to 30% of capacity the vast majority of the time.

Capacity planners have to predict best case load demand for their computers and then leave room for spikes in traffic. While this approach is great for users wanting snappy page refreshes, it’s murder on the CFO who has to write checks for 4 times the computing horsepower actually necessary to run an application.

So the take away is cloud computing is not one thing, or even one set of technologies. It is a combination of old and new technologies and architectures that do have the ability to radically transform the way a business views, operates, interacts with customers, and delivers its goods and services.

The question about adopting these technologies is not “Why?” — it’s “Why not?”

Jay Noble is Director of Cloud Computing at CSC. Follow Jay on Twitter @CSCTrustedCloud.