Although there are many other significant hurdles the cloud must still overcome, the market’s lack of confidence in reliability is a key impediment to adoption – not cost.

Based on our experience in the market, the few large enterprises that are investing in cloud services, are either reserving the usage for either non-mission critical infrastructure functions or where temporary excess capacity (i.e. seasonal retail) is necessary. In some very limited instances – where we are seeing full blown reliance on the cloud – the theme is relatively common. Namely that the enterprises adopting the cloud would not be able to economically justify their infrastructure deployment via any other architecture.

Although these observations are great early signs of adoption, the confidence in cloud computing is still in its early stages (based on some very valid concerns). As for the CapEx/OpEx discussion, I think everyone is agreed that should an enterprise ever make the move to truly go to the cloud (again this is few and far between) that CapEx goes away and overall TCO shall reduce dramatically along with unprecedented ability to scale an enterprise up or down based on utility requirements.

Very exciting times…