I am privileged to co-chair the SDForum Cloud Services SIG. This SIG, which Tibco graciously hosts in its Silicon Valley facility (directly across the street from VMware's HQ, I might add), is fortunate with its location-it attracts a fascinating range of speakers from innovative startups to large established technology powerhouses, all presenting on their cloud computing products, services, and plans. So I was a bit taken aback at the last meeting, when, during the pre-presentation networking, one attendee told me "I'm starting an anti-cloud company."

Two weeks ago, I attended two conferences that illustrated the current chasm between cloud computing advocates and mainstream IT organizations.

McKinsey, the doyen of strategy consultants,published a report on cloud computing last week featuring a disguised real-world case study. While the report doesn't explicitly state the fact, it seems that the paper is a summary of the results of a strategy project with a financial services firm, which apparently engaged McKinsey to assess whether it would make sense to move all of its systems to Amazon Web Services.

Public. Private. Hybrid. Cloudburst. Much of the discussion about cloud computing focuses on deployment options and choices, with a surprisingly large number of enterprises inclining toward internal private clouds-that is, a cloud-capable infrastructure residing within a company's own data center.

The talk of CloudWorld this week was VMware's acquisition of SpringSource. The top-of-mind chatter focused on the price: US$400 million plus, a very large sum for a company doing perhaps US$25 million in revenues. Certainly there was a good bit of envy in this type of conversation. And, of course, the fact that SpringSource is an open source company further makes the number even more eye-watering.

A couple of weeks ago Forrester released a report on cloud computing, based upon a survey of small and large enterprises located in North America and Europe. I was particularly interested in its findings as it addressed the question of private (internal) cloud computing.

Private clouds are a hot topic these days, but not everyone agrees on a definition or the potential benefits.

The topic of private clouds is heating up. A private cloud is, essentially, a cloud computing capability dedicated to one organization. The term "internal cloud" is often used for this kind of functionality, but as many people point out, the term "internal cloud" conflates functionality with location. T