In A Few Years Will We be Talking About Cloud Proliferation in the Same Way as we Talk About Service Proliferation Today?

I think there is a need for governance over the existing infrastructure most people have. In my view, a core facet of clouds (external now, internal tomorrow) is the fact that they are easier to manage and govern. If this facet is missing what is the difference between collection of infrastructure and a "cloud"?

You would imagine that there would be fewer Clouds in the future since the goal of Cloud computing is more efficient use of compute resources. So, I don't believe proliferation is the correct word to use here. Services proliferate when there is insufficient architecture and insufficient value metrics around delivering a service. If you put 20 services out there, chances are only 10% will have value, the others will end up being overhead. If this approach is used with Cloud Computing, it would cost too much to build and operate a Cloud.

I don't think we'll be talking about proliferation of Clouds for an individual enterprise as the goal is to increase the efficiency of infrastructure, so increasing the number of "Clouds" an organization uses seems counter productive to the strategy.

But I think in the short term you'll see a raft of new players enter the "Cloud" space...mostly existing hosting providers trying to get a piece of the pie and to try to protect their installed base by offering Cloud services. I would expect that the push towards Cloud will create a near-term split between public cloud and private cloud providers (the difference being mainly around value prop and packaging of services) and ultimately will be the impetus for further consolidation of players in the industry.

I think we'll still be talking about "service" proliferation. Clouds are the latest service delivery vehicles.

Cloud proliferation is already been seen at the infrastructure layer and there are many choices when it comes to computing power or storage. However, these providers are getting commoditized and squeezed hard by players who are focusing more on a deep stack. Players with platform offerings around the cloud specifically for developers will unleash the potential of the cloud for the ecosystem. The proliferation is therefore working to create more value by feeding this chain reaction instead of undermining the value.