Cloud, for lack of a better word, is good...

Dave Linthicum warns that too many companies are attempting to do private clouds for private clouds' sake, without considering what they're getting into.  Deja vu all over again -- Dave and others were issuing the same warnings about SOA a couple of years back.

Private clouds for private clouds' sake --  not for the business' sake

Still, there's a rush on of companies, taken in by all the hype and noise and vendor pushing and prodding, that are jumping on the private cloud bandwagon -- or think they are. The problem is, these companies may see no appreciable benefits over and beyond what they were getting out of their original IT infrastructure.

As Dave -- author ofCloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise -- puts it: "When using internal cloud computing... you buy the hardware and lease the data center space, and you're in charge of the ongoing operations, just like before. Even with the technical benefits of cloud infrastructure (its high degree of standardization, for example), you end up with a diminished benefit."

Are these well-architected, well-governed private clouds that are underway, or JBOCS implementations? (Just a Bunch of Cloud Services.)

Companies struggled to find SOA benefits because they attempted to service-orient without linking it to a business case.  Now we're seeing it happen with cloud. Deja vu all over again.