Love how they did some number crunching and decided that rent vs own, own won. I think that if more places looked they would find that out also. There must be a margin in it since the big players are making money at it. I'm interested to see what they end up with in the end.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion. It's not just the cost of owning and renewing the hardware, it's everything else that comes with it. Designing your network, performance tuning and debugging everything. Suddenly you have a capacity issue, now what b/c you're not likely to have a spare 100 servers racked and ready to go, or be able to spin them up in 2m? Autoscaling?
Companies spend enormous amounts of engineering hours to maintain their on-premise solutions. And sometimes that's fine b/c you have requirements that you can't easily do in the cloud (think of high frequency trading for example). However, once you tally all that up, plus all the value added services you can buy in the cloud (just take a look at the AWS portfolio for example) the price might well be worth it. That's not to say you won't need engineers to help you with cloud stuff, but you'll probably need less and they'll be able to focus on solving a different class of problems for you.
> There must be a margin in it since the big players are making money at it.
From what I've seen the players aren't making (lots of) money on providing compute power. They're basically racing against each other to the bottom. What they're making money on is all the value added services, the rest of the portfolio AWS/Google Cloud Platform/Azure offers.