I am quite familiar with the Oracle and HP approaches of ‘owning the cloud stack’ and the Amazon Web Services approach which caters to all classes, cloud modules are interchangeable, and the arguments for both sides of the coin, one stop shop as a service, top tier clients verse the open APIs, partnering and interchangeability or plug in play cloud partner models.  I challenge you to look beyond that and see a vast network of fiber, high speed computing available across the globe, from small and large companies over cloud solutions from infrastructure to data warehousing.

The question we should all be asking of small to mid size companies, who will be the solutions provider who pulls this all together?  The solutions integrator, just like we saw in the 80s and early 90s when Banyan Vines, and Novell were sprouting, and we witnessed Microsoft out of the blue take hold of the Networking space.  Are the Amazon Web Services the beginnings of an Open Sourced API Model?  Will VMWare or Red Hat sprout up Cloud Farms?  Will whomever owns the fiber lines, as in the Google Experiments in Kansas, will venture into the Cloud Business Model, provide Open Sourced APIs to small to mid sized businesses to be the small to mid sized solutions integrator of tomorrow?