When I visited Bangalore, India, during the summer, I got an opportunity to visit 3 different non-profits and spend considerable time with the leaders of the organizations. Each of these organizations was founded by very passionate people who in all cases could relate very closely with the issues that the organizations’ constituents were facing and have grown considerably since their inception. I found many similarities between the challenges that these organizations faced and the ones that I commonly see within non-profits in the U.S. But I also saw a very important difference between what I saw in India and what I see in the U.S, which I hope to uncover in this blog.

Within the last year, MCS eliminated all of its technology infrastructure by moving our applications to “the cloud”. For those of you not familiar with cloud computing, its essentially hosted software applications and associated data on the Internet in a models. Such models are also known as “software as a service” or as IBM coined “on demand computing” (for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing). MCS’s move is indicative of major changes underway in the technology world and could be a model for nonprofits.