Bill Saltys, the vice president of US operations and business development at Apps Associates, hopped into theCUBE during Amazon’s re:Invent 2013 conference in Las Vegas to share his take on the public cloud value proposition.

App Associates is a privately-held provider of IT services and solutions that specializes in Oracle environments. Founded in 2002, the firm leverages AWS to host ‘Try-It-Now-Free” Labs that let customers run their relational databases and legacy apps in the cloud.

“The cloud is really all about how do you innovate for business value,” Saltys tells theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. “And many clients are struggling with how they do that with the cloud, how they do that with other applications and technologies they have. But that vision is important, the paradigm [is] shifting for them, and we think the cloud is a big part of that.”

Saltys details that his firm’s clients, most of which are enterprises, usually start out with relatively small-scale AWS deployments for “transient” workloads such as test and dev and backup. These companies want to understand and avoid the risks associated with offloading processes to the cloud, but at the same time they’re also interesting in the benefits of doing so. Some CIOs are taking an “iterative” approach, he continues, while others have more of a wait-and-see attitude.

Asked whether customers are utilizing AWS to process large-scale transactional workloads, Saltys says that the US subsidiary of a billion-dollar-plus Japanese “printing organization” has migrated its entire infrastructure to Amazon’s cloud. That includes e-mail, ERP, data warehousing, and transactional systems, among others.

Cloud adoption is picking up, Vellante observes, both in the Wikibon community and beyond. Saltys agrees, noting that enterprises are gradually moving from why to how as their lock-in agreements expire.

“The discussions that are going on around that vision, around the business value are exactly that, ‘how do we get there, and what can we do from a roadmap point of view to manage that risk,’” he says. “They may be doing like a co-lo[cation] or managed service contract, that’s a three-year contract, they’re not gonna do anything til that contract is up these large enterprises. It’s things like that that are friction to the whole movement.”

Click the video below for the full interview.