The demand for distributed data and services is increasing as big companies are more and more spread across the world.
Cloud services are raging from simple storage and up to complex computing processes. Depending on the needs there are products that run completely into the cloud while others are just storing the data into the cloud. In the last few years there is a battle that is given between desktop based applications and cloud based ones.
The notion of web-based products refers to software that runs within a browser on the client side. Generally the central computing part is kept entirely (computing and storage) within the cloud on the software provider side. However for certain offerings like RationalPlan it is also possible to have the central computing unit as a server module on the customer side. This might be a security measure for some customers.