> You still need people to make those decisions, and that is what corporate IT is about - it's about designing, implementing and refining processes, not really

> You still need people to make those decisions, and that is what corporate IT is about - it's about designing, implementing and refining processes, not really technology. The tech is a tool, not the be all end all. I think that "cloud" will be a definite bonus to the SMB shop, and provide a wonderful amount of spare capacity to enterprise shops, but I can't foresee "the cloud" replacing in-house IT completely. But it will replace the major costs of corporate IT - technical resources services. For example, today a large corp (let's use Gazprom as an example) will contract a big IT services company (let's use Wipro for example) to manage their servers. This specific AWS service can in theory replace a large Citrix farm. When I was internal at SAP for example, every employee had access to their very own remote windows desktop, which had the basic office software on it required to do anything they could do on their laptop. The overall idea of cloud isn't the technology, it's that it's shared services.