In this recent BLOG "Private Clouds More Pervasive Than Thought" Joe McKendrick perfectly confirmed the strong position of Private Clouds that I predict for some time already. Yes, Private Cloud is for medium-to-large companies because they can afford it but the cost factor doe not necessary preclude small companies with money to use Private Cloud.
Joe conducted an interesting survey among 267 members of the the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and the survey confirmed the mentioned opinion about Private Cloud. However, from the definitions used in the survey for the Public and Private Cloud:
"For purposes of this survey, underwritten by Oracle, we defined "private clouds" as virtualized IT resources, controlled and owned by the organization, providing on-demand shared services to end users within or affiliated with the organization. By contrast, for purposes of this study, public clouds are services offered to any and all users on a commercial, pay-per-use basis by a third party"
I can conclude that the spectrum of Private Cloud solutions was extremely squeezed down to 'in-house' ones. I think that Public Cloud differs from Private Cloud not by ownership or commercial attribute of the contract between the client and provider but by business and technical transparency. The later provides a contractual control of the client over the management of its assets deployed in the environment owned by the Cloud provider.
.As a result of this definition, a Private Cloud is anything that is transparent to the client. By transparency I mean that mugginess of Cloud - client does not know where its SW assets are deployed, how they are maintained and what physical dependency on 'neighbors' exist in the Cloud - is removed. This allows count any SW Hosting company as a Private Cloud if this company provides full operational visibility to its clients against deployed software. Such visibility includes on-demand: deployment and re-deployment of SW on known HW/SW platforms that have custom configuration for this particular client, certification and compliance verification, security verification, audit accessibility and license controls. The Private Cloud may be realised in SaaS, PaaS and other models, this depends on the client needs.
Thus, the organisation does not need to own the Private Cloud assets; it can hire a 3rd Party Hosting company with appropriate computational and maintenance capabilities and deploy corporate applications in there. The contract between the organisation and the Cloud provider may be vary significantly but it can include such constraint on the provider as it must preserve business interests and reputation of the client when deploying the client's software among other provider's clients. This constraint articulated in more accurate legal terms can preclude provider from creating deployment dependencies (co-locations) that may hurt its client's business.
If we consider Private Cloud as described - inside and outside of the client ownership domain - it will appear much more pervasive than Joe's work have demonstrated already.
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