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It's hard to avoid talking about the cloud, that nice techie term for applications that run across the Internet. But as tax and accounting professionals embark on another buying season, the topic can't be avoided and everyone likes to at least talk about hot topics.

Most accountants don't need an editor telling them that turning to the latest and greatest isn't always the most cost effective. If the pain and cost of going to a new application is greater than the pain and cost of staying with an old one, the smart money doesn't move.

There's no avoiding the Internet, Cloud, SaaS, whatever you want to call it or however you want to define it. Almost everyone uses email and while many businesses might not use web-based social media, most business owners probably utilize some social networking in their personal lives. And it's virtually impossible to buy tax software without going to the web. Most of these applications are downloaded.

What's left is the question of whether business applications, or at least elements of business applications, all need to have their code executed across the cloud. And for some uses, that 's not essential.

There is truth to the view that one of the most important factors about the web is not the technology, it's the ability to pay for applications on a subscription basis, pretty much the old lease-versus-buy argument in new garb.

And that's also about another nice thing to have in business-choice. If businesses have the choice to have on-premise software, hosted software of cloud software, then that is the ideal solution because not all organizations have the same need.

There's really no need to go to the cloud just because it's there.

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