What’s up with cloud computing? It’s been more than a year since major service providers — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — joined dozens of software companies to offer hosted services for business applications, infrastructure and development platforms. The buzz has been continuous and loud.

Many pundits told us that large, risk-averse businesses were leaning toward private clouds — where they hosted apps themselves for internal customers — versus public clouds. In his recent blog, for instance, Ted Ritter wrote that the Nemertes Research 2011/12 enterprise IT benchmark study found “very high interest in private clouds. In fact, 35 percent of the 240 organizations participating in the benchmark will have a private cloud within the next two years.”

And as far back as last year, blogger Robin Bloor wrote: “It’s difficult for a CIO today not to be considering a cloud-related strategy. Over the past three years, these hosted services have acquired marketing sparkle, and every IT vendor worth its socks has developed offerings.”

Ravi Rajagopal, Vice President, Cloud Strategy, CA Technologies, also wrote that “74 percent of enterprises have deployed a cloud service and have allocated up to 30 percent in cloud spending, and about 70 percent of enterprises are investing in building private clouds,” based on an Avanade 2011 Cloud Global Survey.

The verdict on cloud adoption sounds pretty clear, right? Well, maybe not. Just last month at the Interop New York conference, Lauren Nelson, Researcher at Forrester Research, said that very few organizations have actually implemented internal private cloud environments.

Nelson said that just 6 percent of those surveyed had internal private clouds in place in early 2011. And at another session I attended, Great Debate: We Will Always Have Private Clouds, industry analysts avidly debated the merits and the future of private clouds. One team's job was to persuade you that we'll always have on-premises private clouds, and the other's job was to argue that we'll eventually move to a utility model where you never touch your servers.[More on this session to follow].

Even this far along the adoption curve, then, it seems as if we’re running into definitional differences over what constitutes a private cloud. Forrester says it should have characteristics such as automated deployment and management, self-service access, shared architecture between business units, and pay-per-use billing.

Ritter noted that “When analysts talk about private clouds, we assume everyone is on the same page: A cloud is a metered, multitenant, accessible, elastic and self-provisioned service offering.” While most enterprise IT professionals agree with these characteristics, he says they also resist automated self-provisioning.

Perhaps, that’s why Timothy Chou, an early cloud advocate, chooses to describe cloud services as data center, compute and store, application and platform services rather than public versus private cloud in his primer here. And Andrew McAfee, author and digital business professor at MIT, in the current issue of Harvard Business Review offers an insightful blog about what CEOs need to know about the cloud here, with lots of perceptive comments noted by readers. Perhaps the fine-tuning is a sign that the market is maturing.

How is your business approaching cloud services? Our current poll on Smart Enterprise Exchange so far indicates more enterprises using cloud than not—but many are still in the early stages. Perhaps CA Technology VP George Watt’s assessment is most accurate when he says: “Cloud computing is like a band that took 20 years to become an overnight success.”

We will be offering additional insights and thought leadership regarding private, public and hybrid clouds in the next few months. Meanwhile, please take the poll and add your vote as well as your comments to this ongoing discussion.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange