"The role of the IT person is changing," said Greg Buoncontri, chief information officer for Pitney Bowes, during one panel on cloud computing at Wired magazine's CIO Leadership Forum in New York.

Buoncontri said that while Pitney Bowes' IT personnel have traditionally concentrated on security and operational efficiency, now they also must find ways to use cloud IT services as a "catalyst for growth" for the company.

In other words, cloud services are creating a more competitive environment for the bank. Buoncontri described an unnamed new financial services company that used cloud service providers for most all of its IT services, including core banking, CRM (customer relationship management), Internet banking and mobile banking. Existing businesses will feel the pressure of startups rapidly lashing together existing cloud services to create new offerings, he noted.

"The maturation of these technologies might lead us to a place where we [will] have less technical people in-house than we currently have," Buoncontri said. "Increasingly, our role will be on solution design. It's a different kind of skillset."