The main problem that will need to be overcome for this to get kind of traction - licensing that is generally pretty outdated or brain-dead. Unless you have an

The main problem that will need to be overcome for this to get kind of traction - licensing that is generally pretty outdated or brain-dead. Unless you have an enterprise license, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc - all tend to license on a per CPU or per Core basis... It's really annoying. Because you'll have some whizzbang J2EE app that you want to run. However, instead of popping it onto your scalable IBM WebSphere cluster, you put in a dedicated WebSphere instance. I've seen it happen and done it myself many times. Why? Because it's CPU licensed. And the cluster has 10 CPUs that you'll 20% utilise. But it's still licensed as 10 CPUs. So it's much cheaper to license for 2 dedicated CPUs and take the operational hit (and probably environmental hit). Cloud computing is meant to be licensed like a utility - proprietary software is going to have to catch up. Hopefully they've got the licensing situation sewn up with this.