I'm expecting 2009 to be a year in which large companies embrace cloud computing in greater numbers. But how will they do it? And why? Eli Lilly, an early adopter of Amazon Web Services, will discuss its motivations and experiences in an upcoming InformationWeek Webcast.Eli Lilly is using on-demand servers and storage from Amazon to support its pharmaceuticals research. Dave Powers, an IT pro with Eli Lilly who is helping to spearhead that effort, says the speed of implementation, flexibility, and collaborative capabilities of cloud services are "absolutely disruptive" in how the company thinks about and deploys IT resources.

I talked to Dave yesterday, and two things became clear. First, Eli Lilly's adoption of cloud services are being driven by real business requirements to manage costs while making high performance computing available to the company's researchers. Dave says there's a "sense of urgency to change" at Eli Lilly. And second, Eli Lilly is still working through the challenges of cloud computing, including how to coordinate and manage the use of cloud services from multiple service providers.

Dave will talk about these issues and more in InformationWeek's "How To Plug Into The Cloud" Webcast, which takes place Thursday, Jan. 8, at 2 p.m. Eastern. Adam Selipsky, VP of product management and developer relations for Amazon Web Services, also will be a featured speaker, and I'll be moderating it all. To hear more about how Eli Lilly is using the cloud and its plans for the future, join us. You can register here.