After seeing a number of these promising beginnings turn into stalled launches, my friend concluded that some kind of organizational anxiety was preventing them from taking concrete steps. He believes a "defogging" service designed to help IT organizations clearly understand their options would help them move forward with confidence.

His experience mirrors my firm's. At speaking engagements, I interact with people who are intellectually convinced that aggressively moving toward cloud computing is necessary, but seem hesitant and even confused about what to do. In fact, you can see me discuss this in a conducted at a recent conference.

Upon reflection, the reasons for their confusion are obvious:

. Everywhere one turns, up pops another "cloud computing" solution. Each day brings new solutions along with old solutions disguised in new cloud computing raiments. The plethora of choices does not ease decision making. In fact, too many choices, as I wrote about a while back, actually makes people more likely to make no decision. Not understanding what is the right choice in an environment of many choices breeds disquietude.

Vendor overload. It's obvious that the landscape of IT is changing, and if you're an established vendor, your revenue stream is at risk. So you develop a cloud product and then turn every sales rep in the company loose with it. The relentless stream of vendors insisting that you need to listen to their cloud vision results in apathy and lassitude--and an intense wish the clamor would stop.