Simply put, forecasting total demand and planning for sufficient capacity to meet it is going to become much more difficult. And make no mistake about it, when this cloud demands gets going, and apps groups begin to assume that resources will be available immediately whenever theyre requested, total demand is going to explode.

One key point in all this is to recognize the difference in how the compute resources are funded. In the past, application groups had to obtain the capital needed to fund compute resources to operate the application. This led to the "those are HR's servers, and those are Finance's" type of situation. This new cloud world assumes that a central IT group will fund the resources, and then allow apps groups to use them in a shared fashion, paying only for what they use.

The traditional model meant that each application was responsible for its own utilization profile. Buy too little server, well, your apps run slow. Buy too much server, well, you wasted some money. In the cloud world, however, the responsibility for ensuring appropriate utilization is transferred from the individual apps groups to the cloud provider.

This brings us to another challenge -- utilization risk. It's our perspective that the economics of IT are about to undergo a transformation to something much more like how airlines operate. Airlines focus on being highly efficient -- having just enough planes, enough labor, and sufficient resources like fuel and food in place to meet demand, with a small amount of reserve capacity. And the airline assumes all utilization risk; individual passengers take on no responsibility for funding the airline's resources -- the passengers only pay for what they use.