In my conversations with some of the Google Enterprise sales people last week in Dublin, one of the themes that came up again and again is the challenge of selling Cloud into traditional IT departments. The bottom line is that it's a major threat if your personal line of business is providing networks, servers, PCs and the software that string them all together.
It's something that Salesforce recognised very early on in the way in which they aggressively marketed to non-IT professionals by telling particularly marketing and sales heads that here was a service that could let you do what you needed without an obstructive IT department getting in the way. It was exactly that channel that saw Salesforce emerge whilst I was working at Reuters, and made me realize that the game was up for traditional IT.
The collaboration space, however, is one where IT has a much stronger hold. But a lot of the reasons given as to why Cloud can't happen start to seem merely dismissive tactics by people in fear of losing their jobs. But those who don't work out how to reinvent themselves for this emerging new world are likely to be the ones who will struggle most as cloud-based services become increasingly dominant.
mmitII 