I am not an early adopter. As a semi-slow native Midwesterner, I need to think new things over, often for a long time, before deciding they're OK.

Thus I am starting my Cloud Computing conversation now, rather than a year or more ago.

In my job as Editor-in-Chief of NOW Magazine, I've been covering SOA, BPM, Ajax, BI, and Virtualization for awhile. I remember when Web Services turned into SOA. (Heck, I remember when 45s turned into LPs.)

Now all this and more is being hoisted into the sky and into the cloud. Blue Sky has become a legitimate way of thinking about IT. Wow. The physical reality of the original bug (a moth that Grace Hopper found) has now metamorphosized into the complete abstraction of all IT resources (to the user).

So what does this mean? Is this the latest paradigm shift, the latest techno-marketing babble, a revolution, a revolutionary evolution, what?

I'm up to speed on my SaaS/IaaS/PaaS trilogy, and happy to see that PaaS (Platform as a Service) has only been listed in wikipedia since January of this year. So I'm not wholly late to the cloud conversation.

I (and you) know all about new RAS concerns within the cloud, the stringency and effectiveness of what will be a new generation of SLAs, and how much interaction the local IT team really will spend hassling with server issues, now that these problem have, in theory, been delegated to the cloud provider (Amazon, Google, whomever).

But I think the key insight here involves what the Cloud-empowered CIO will do, and what type of people will be hired in the Cloud-empowered organization? I can summarize the conversation into two short sentences:

Flip 80/20 on its head. Hit the gas and go.

In other words, you will stop devoting 80 percent of your resources to maintenance and only 20 percent to innovation. And when you want to achieve something, you don't have to wait for your new architecture to take shape in your data center.

Cloud is a utility. You just put in the wires and pipes, turn on the faucets and flip the switches, and you've got water and electricity.

This is the thought that I'll develop in a new, extended article I'm writing at the moment. I can't wait to see the final draft!

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