If you’re not IBM or Amazon or Google but a mid-size IT company, how do you ‘sell‘ Cloud computing?

The problem – if it were one – arises from the notion of Cloud computing being a diffuse, amorphous presence within which resides all means of performing tasks. Some may recall the Fred Hoyle sci-fi novel The Black Cloud (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud) wherein a peripatetic cloud arrives in the solar system and is revealed to be a super-organism, many times more intelligent than humans. But we digress.

Cloud is, of course, not like this. Cloud is not any kind of computer model - real, virtual or abstract. It is a delivery model.

For decades the IT department has agonised over build versus buy decisions. Now that argument is being leapfrogged to an entirely different debate. It is about provision of services that solve workloads. Should that provision be via the IT department or should it be direct to the party that needs the solution? The growing evidence is that it will be the latter.

Recall how Commercial Off-The-Shelf products (COTS) superseded special in-house designed or contract-developed products? Recall how PCs began to be sourced direct by user departments? Look how personal mobile phones are invading the corporate space. And so, in a similar way, will user departments procure their own solutions from Cloud offerings.

This development presents an opportunity for both the mid-sized Cloud supplier as well as a host of SME Cloud suppliers. These will be the companies that can make contact at different levels in a company from CEO down to operating departmental heads with solutions to problems.

At a recent presentation by Logicalis (www.logicalis.com) the company outlined an evolution from a supplier perhaps first monitoring services, then managing services, hosting services, integrating services and ultimately delivering them from the Cloud. Logicalis believes the key instrument for achieving this is through the Data Center. As this is the area of expertise that the company has been focused on and from which it gains half its revenues, in the words of Mandy Rice-Davies, “they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

Forgive the cheap jibe, for it is difficult to gainsay Logicalis’ thesis. While there are Google Aps running from the desktop (code.google.com/appengine/) , Amazon appears uncertain of its business model for the Cloud (aws.amazon.com/ec2/), Microsoft looks for direction with Azure (www.microsoft.com/azure/services.mspx), only big blue IBM seems to be focused.

So if you are not a giant, Logicalis may well have the right answer to the Cloud.