Three weeks after McKinsey & Company slipped its foot into the door of the emerald tower, Condé Nast staffers continue to ask what fresh hell they find themselves in.

“I saw Graydon in the cafeteria this week!” said one business-side insider, last Friday. “In all my years here, I’ve never seen him in my life there.”

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“The cloud” has come to represent the bright future of computing, a world where processing and storage become as ubiquitous, cheap and accessible as electricity. But for big business, one researcher argues that “cloud” metaphor may be economically apt: The closer you look at the much-hyped technology’s price advantages, the fuzzier they seem.

At a conference organized by the Uptime Institute, a consulting firm focused on data center technologies, McKinsey & Co. analyst William Forrest on Wednesday plans to present a report aimed at debunking cloud computing’s appeal for large businesses.

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A new study, released Tuesday by McKinsey & Company, reveals in some of the clearest terms yet the sea change that is under way in business software. The consulting firm surveyed more than 850 corporate software buyers, from firms of all sizes, and found that software-as-a-service is rapidly “becoming mainstream,” with three-quarters of software buyers saying they are “favorably disposed to adopting SaaS platforms” for software development and deployment. The rapidly growing embrace of Web applications is leading, says McKinsey, to a fierce competitive battle, between “traditional mega-vendors and the larger SaaS incumbents,” for the future of the enterprise software business.

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