Hype or Fact | Is there really an explosion in Cloud Computing?

I read something today that made me wonder about the "explosion" of cloud services. Is that real or is it just someone saying it. We all know that Cloud is the new buzz word - and if you sell IT services, and you don't sell "cloud" services - well, you might as well close your business today and accept defeat.

But is that really true? If you sell billions of dollars in IT services today, but decide for some reason or another to not create and sell you're own cloud services [potentially partnering with someone else] - does that mean you'll be out of business in very near future?

The answer I keep coming up with is..."I don't think so". I've done enough research into the IT Services business to understand that most cloud offers are not really cloud offerings. They are "subscription" services, but not necessary "On Demand". In the world of hardware, we used to call these types of "contracts" IDIQ [indefinite demand indefinite quantity] - Cloud Services are just IDIQ for "services" - primarily compute and storage - potentially you could wrap some specialty applications in the mix - but let's not go there.

So, even if the biggest Cloud provider today [which is most the likely Amazon - but they don't provide separate financials for AWS] sold $1 billion worth of cloud services this year [which they won't] it is still just drop in the overall IT Services bucket. Most market watchers say that cloud will only make up between 10% to 20% within 5 years. That's great, and of course that means there is 90% to 80% that is not cloud services.

If I decided to write anything else about Cloud - I may decided to discuss how having thousands of individual companies using your infrastructure could become a real strain for your cloud services company.