In the days immediately following the election, the president-elect will dispatch transition teams. And since both Barack Obama and John McCain's campaigns have and other cloud-based services to help their campaigns, these transition teams may come to Washington with a different attitude about what they want from federal IT systems.

That's why next week's election may create an opportunity for vendors to pitch new technology directions, and cloud services adoption in particular, said Michael Farber, a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a management consulting firm with a number of federal clients.

Farber said he believes the period following the election will be a fertile time to "structure a pilot and forge a partnership with ."

Ballmer's memo, which echoed the sweeping, change-is-at-hand message of Bill Gates' 1995 , bundles the cloud, social networking, and the diversity of access devices, to argue that a "dramatic transformation" is taking place in IT. The vendors are already pushing federal IT managers to adopt some of these changes.

Microsoft and other providers including Google, believe their platforms can handle the government's most sensitive material. At a small forum here that included government IT managers from the data processing-intensive intelligence community such as one who identified himself (to chuckles from the audience) as from a "non-descript" federal agency, attendees raised questions about the security of cloud services.