In Houston yesterday, I spoke about cloud computing at an IDC/Energy Insights gathering of IT executives from the Oil and Gas industry.  It was a high-powered group, with 5 of the top 10 global energy companies represented (it’s been a big month for me with the Energy sector – a few weeks ago, in Milan, I met with the CIO of another of the top 10 global energy players, Eni S.p.A.).

The interest in cloud computing by these Energy industry IT leaders was strong – we had a lively 1-1/2 hour discussion, which could have easily gone on for twice the time.  Here are some of the comments/questions that these execs had about cloud computing – they offer some interesting insights to the IT industry about how users are thinking about cloud computing right now, and what vendors should be focusing on to position for success in this industry transition:

• Integrating Cloud and on-premise IT. Most of the meeting participants wondered aloud how to ntegrate cloud services with their existing IT systems and IT service delivery strategy.  There was a lot of note-taking when I mentioned that a growing number of vendors are rolling out “bridging” offerings, aimed at simplify the deployment of on-site virtualized workloads/applications to the cloud.  (I spoke about this fit of cloud services into CIOs’ gameplans at IDC Directions – noting that the future of Cloud services will be as elements of a coherent, integrated portfolio of service-oriented offerings, including virtualized on-premise and externally-sourced cloud offerings.  I also wrote about this connection between CIOs’ long-term SOA strategy and cloud services three years ago in How SOA Will Really Be Adopted: Under the Covers, and On the Net.)
• Vendor lock-in and cloud interoperability. They’re very concerned about vendor lock-in by cloud services providers, and are interested in standards that will allow greater ability to switch providers.  They also indicated that they want to see more progress in allowing interoperability and integration among different providers’ cloud services and platforms.  Both the information/service portability issue and the inter-cloud interoperability/integration issue are serious ones for users, as we noted in The “Open Cloud”: a Pre-Condition for Broad Cloud Adoption?.  Yes, we’re seeing cloud vendors develop multi-lateral interoperability agreements, as well as third-party interoperability bridges.  But customers like the ones at this meeting are still waiting for more: for the major Cloud SPs to commit to collaborating with each other on broad, open and durable interoperability commitments.
• Credible cost comparisons. The energy execs want to see more detailed/credible cost comparisons between cloud and traditional IT deployments.  This means a true apples-to-apples comparison; not comparing, say, Salesforce.com CRM with just SAP or Oracle licensed CRM software packages, but with all of the related capital and operating costs of those packages (including the costs of the IT stack required to run those packages).
• User experiences. They want more examples of companies, particularly ones of their (large) size,  that have successfully migrated to a cloud solution.  One participant asked specifically about whether many large companies had yet successfully migrated to Microsoft’s Exchange Online offering.
• Accommodating more “customization” in the cloud. One participant noted that IDC surveys I shared showed “standardization” as a key cloud benefit, but – conversely – that users also want the ability to “customize” cloud services to some extent; he wondered how that tension would be sorted out as the cloud model matured.  I shared IDC’s view that the web standards foundation of the cloud model, and emergence of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) deployment model (i.e., common application infrastructure shared among solutions ecosystem participants), would allow a growing population of specialized solutions providers to create off-the-shelf extensions on top of broad, standard cloud solutions – and that this would allow users to acquire very “customized” solutions that still took advantage of the mass market economics of the cloud model. We already see this model taking hold in the developer/integrator communities developing around the SaaS vendors’ PaaS offerings (e.g., Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Netsuite’s SuiteCloud).   
• Will Cloud providers survive the downturn? in the current economic downturn, they are concerned about the viability of some smaller cloud/SaaS players, and are looking for those vendors (or third parties) to provide assurance of viability, and mitigation plans should those assurances fail.