When I talk to CIOs about clouds, they like the small unit of consumption you can procure. They like the control it provides over the duration of the supply - perfect to handle seasonality . They like the rapid speed of provisioning - often in minutes. And of course, they love the economics.
But cloud computing today mostly affects processing and storage.
There are plenty of other IT infrastructure areas - messaging, network management, deskside support, asset management, mobile device support - which could use a similar paradigm.
CIOs are tired of signing 7 year deals. Tired of buying in thousands of units. They don't want to go through months of contracting. And they want it priced by consumption metric - per deskside visit at remote office location, price per Microsoft Exchange user etc.
I read that HCL has signed a major infrastructure deal with Nokia. Signs that Indian vendors are finally maturing their infrastructure services.
But for every such mega-deal, I would suggest the opportunity increases for "micro-deals" - the cloud principles applied to other infrastructure services
