Nicholas Carr, the author of several books on technology, business and culture including 2004’s “Does IT Matter: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage,” sees little if any advantage in companies maintaining their own data centers.

He compares owning a dedicated data center to owning a dedicated power utility. As with electricity, it makes more sense to purchase computing resources from large, centralized providers that utilize the economies of scale to provide them in a more efficient and cost-effective model than companies can on their own, writes Carr in his latest book, “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.” He is one of the best-known proponents of so-called cloud computing, an idea that has been gaining velocity in the IT world.

While Carr’s view makes intuitive sense, not everyone agrees with it. McKinsey & Co. analyst William Forrest just released a report in which he asserts that large enterprises could end up paying more than twice as much for cloud computing services than they would to own the same computing resources in-house.

The report compares the costs incurred by an unnamed McKinsey & Co. client to purchase and manage the processing cores that run the company’s Linux and Windows applications to the price of running the same cores via Amazon’s Elastic Cloud infrastructure service. Forrest’s conclusion: The company will spend nearly 150 percent more in the cloud computing model.

Not surprisingly, Carr takes exception with the report on his Rough Type blog. He writes: “The real opportunity that the cloud offers large companies today is as a supplement or complement to their in-house operations rather than as a complete replacement. The cloud model offers a way to gain access to additional computing and storage capacity, particularly to cover fluctuations in demand or carry out a short-term data-crunching exercise, without having to make capital investments in new equipment or hire more workers.”

The report also doesn’t take into account the savings on software licensing and maintenance fees gained by using software-as-a-service, Carr points out. Ultimately, he predicts, the cloud “will be more interesting for the new models of computing it opens up rather than for its ability to accommodate the old ones.”

How Far SaaS Can Take the Company

For many companies, especially smaller ones, purchasing SaaS applications may satisfy most of their IT needs. SaaS is cloud computing’s application layer. Users typically expect SaaS providers to handle most, if not all, ongoing application development and management.

“Small companies are likely to find SaaS so much better than what they may be doing right now, many of them will be completely happy to use it as is,” says Amy Wohl, lead analyst at Wohl Associates and author of “Succeeding at SaaS: Computing in the Cloud.”

In particular, she says, SaaS is a logical choice for e-mail and other commodity-type applications “which sop up an enormous amount of resources for no competitive advantage whatsoever” and for applications used by employees and others for collaborative tasks in multiple locations.

SaaS is less appropriate for applications that may require a significant amount of customization, says Jonathan Bryce, co-founder of Mosso, the cloud computing division of Rackspace. “With a SaaS application, you may be able to make changes to data fields and things like that, but you can’t pick which (programming) language it’s in, how many servers it runs on, whether servers are in your network. So the biggest driver out of the gate for many of these decisions is how much flexibility and customization you need for your applications.”

Such applications may still be candidates for the cloud but are likely better suited to one of the two additional layers beyond SaaS: middleware-as-a-service or platform-as-service.

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