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Cloud computing offers a spectrum of choices

Those who deploy virtualization will then go to the cloud, Bittman said, but they will do so in an evolutionary manner over the long term. "Nicholas Carr said that it would be a slow switch except in the title of his book, The Big Switch," he said.

Bittman further noted that cloud computing is a spectrum of choices between on premises and hosted, between generic and customized -- and other variables.

One factor hindering cloud adoption is interoperability and the lack of open standards, a situation not likely to be changed by the Open Cloud Manifesto. "It was well-meaning but key players were not part of it. The cloud ecosystem is proprietary islands and standards initiatives are driven by the little guys who need to federate to compete, but the little guys want to differentiate too and may not want open standards," Bittman said.

Without open standards, most of the money in cloud computing will be made supporting private clouds, "but the private cloud is a stepping stone, not a destination," he said.

He added that in the long term, organizations will have dozens or hundreds of clouds, each delivering one service, and integrators, who currently focus on supporting hardware and servers, will become service brokers.

IT organizations that thrive in this environment will know the cost of every service and will charge lines of business for what they use, he said.

He noted that line of business managers already have the option of paying for cloud services, and those public cloud prices will compete with an IT organization's private cloud.

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When choosing vendors, IT managers should not assume that the largest cloud will win. "The market will be Darwinian. It will consist of giants surrounded by smaller, hungrier providers," he said.

The market is still very immature. If you want to do something you couldn't do within your organization -- such as run a batch process on a million servers for a minute -- you cannot because the cloud providers cannot yet deliver that service. "Amazon is chunky," he said. "If you want more than 10 servers, you need to call them. You cannot order that on the Web."

He concluded that it is already clear whose private cloud will be the biggest. "The government will spend billions of dollars per year and will have the biggest private clouds," he said.

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