Hi James, always nice to read your thoughts. As longtime cloud services provider focused on our enterprise-thinking customers' needs for application SLAs rather than hardware SLAs, what we see customers truly want is to get quality IT services quickly at low cost. Cloud *technology* has been essential to achieving this, but the popular definition of cloud computing *services* which emphasizes self-service has often not provided it. The reason for why it hasn't fulfilled the promise of democratizing computing as we all hoped is that customers simply replaced hardware administrators with cloud administrators, as we found from following up on our own list of deals we didn't close. Since the cloud customers still needed Priests of Production Computing in order to have quality IT services, they ended up keeping their IT Department in charge of cloud computing, negating a large fraction of the potential cost savings. Our Dave Durkee wrote in more depth about this in the current Communications of the ACM in "Why Cloud Computing Will Never Be Free"
-Eric Novikoff (http://www.enkiconsulting.net)
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