Also, rather than apply an outsource model, it’s more likely to be selective out-tasking. Meaning, these targeted solutions can coexist with in-house solutions — there’s no need to confront the enterprise IT leadership with the notion of dramatic changes.

That said, the real bonus for a weary CIO isn’t the economics, although the cost-reduction is welcome. It’s the freeing up of their time — that’s gained by out-tasking basic infrastructure, and thereby removing the drudgery of operations and maintenance headaches.

Moreover, some CIOs are eager to demonstrate to their Line of Business heads that they can deliver a project with meaningful new strategic competitive impact. That takes leadership talent, an investment of time and flawless execution.

1. I don’t trust the marketing angle. I suspect that “cloud” is an attractive euphemism for “no longer a problem on planet earth”. That, of course, is not possible. Technology development always presents difficult problems.

2. I hear that “the cloud does not like databases”. The cloud does a good job providing vast amounts of cpu and storage, but it does a poor job with the kind of bottlenecks often found in database access. If true, this would put the lie to the whole concept (in my opinion).

It seems fairly clear that economic challenges can motivate strapped organizations to consider new options. In fact, I’m elaborating on that a bit in a two-part post, of which the first post is here (and the second will follow very soon).

For a number of customers a strong need to scale has been the driver that caused them to look at private clouds (that was true at both FedEx and GeoEye – a provider of satellite imagery to Google and the US intelligence community, among others).

So in terms of this post, that was what drove them to “Step 1″. Whether they take the second step or not almost doesn’t matter – they’ve already realized substantial cost, scale, flexibility, and reliability benefits from adopting private cloud technologies and operational philosophies.

One More Thing This brings me to what may be the most important point. This post, like so many of the conversations in the industry, miss what is probably the single most important factor in an enterprise actually adopting cloud computing – the applications.

Indeed, what about the applications?

Well it turns out that while so much of the conversation has been around extending virtualization models, creating operational and billing models that can enable the flexibility whose promise is so attractive – all good things – what most enterprises eventually come around to (or in fact start from!) are the applications themselves.

In other words, how do I cloud enable the applications that I really want to run?

This is true, of course, whether the applications is going to be deployed in my own private cloud or perhaps one of the increasingly capable public cloud choices.

So that’s why we focus on cloud-enabling applications, which as you may guess has become quite enjoyable!

They have one primary edict: Keep the Lights On and No One Dies.

To expect them to embrace and deploy new technology comes along is going to make VCs very angry with their portfolio companies.

The transition to the cloud is going to take time and, as you indicated, a testing of waters: one or two fringe applications to start, maybe a storage unit here and there.

But no doubt that the economics will drive more adoption at this point (as illustrated in our PaaS-onomics whitepaper: http://www.longjump.com/paas-offers/paas-whitepaper.htm)