Bernard Golden, CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, found himself in Korea a couple of weeks ago giving a keynote address on "Creating a CIO Cloud Computing Action Plan." The surprising reaction he got led him to write an article for CIO.com about the dangers of avoiding the inevitable evolution that's taking place at the very heart of enterprise technology.

The old desktop/laptop model is splintering, with those devices being joined by smartphone and now tablets. The thing is, it's not going to stop there. The spread of computing into devices has only started, and soon computing will be performed by things we will barely consider to qualify as a device - not to mention sensors and actuators.

The problem, Golden found, was that the conference attendees were very slow to get the message.

When queried about who was doing a private cloud implementation, not a single hand went up. When asked who was using external public clouds, no more than two or three hands went up. And when the question of use of SaaS was posed, only a couple of people raised their hands."

What did he conclude?

• The U.S. is actually further ahead than one might think. There's lots of discussion about how U.S. IT organizations are being very deliberate (not to say, deliberately slow) about moving to cloud computing, but (in the U.S.) there would have been a bunch more hands in the air.
• CIOs are confused about cloud computing. It's a different confusion than last year. Then, CIOs were confused about exactly what cloud computing is. Today, CIOs have a better sense of what cloud computing is. Now, they're confused about how to apply it in their environment.
• It's early, but you'd better prepare for cloud computing. Even if you think cloud computing is overblown, there's no denying that the benefits of even the early stage server consolidation version of virtualization offers enormous financial benefits.

-- Don Willmott