As everyone else is saying: it's a buzzword. :-) Re "private clouds", though: While many of them are just P2V projects as the OP said, some organizations are u

As everyone else is saying: it's a buzzword. :-) Re "private clouds", though: While many of them are just P2V projects as the OP said, some organizations are using them in "cloud-ish" ways in the sense of dynamic provisioning and resource allocation. In a large company with many quasi-independent units (such as various R&D groups, a group running production simulations, etc), I've seen "private clouds" allow a generic infrastructure to provide dynamically-sized resources to those varied groups. No one department has to maintain hardware; each one can still exert a large amount of configuration control without consulting central IT for more than resource allocation; and it's all "in the family", so there are no security concerns.