Gartner prognosticates and pisses in punch bowl at cloud computing shindig

Gartner pissed in the proverbial punchbowl this week with their prognostication that cloud computing will not be mature until 2015. Jon Foley was surprised by the conservative nature of this prediction. Rightscale reacted (appropriately and expectedly) by saying “but it’s exciting now!” I have to say that having been involved in the building of two cloud-based services and spending a year talking to clients about cloud computing already in a recent venture, I think that Gartners timeline is about right. It’s a long-haul transition. We have a lot of work to do to bridge physical on-site infrastructure to cloud. It will happen in broad phases, like all technology adoption, with some segments (test & dev for example), racing ahead.