We made the point in our latest UK SITS Market Trends & Forecasts report that vendors have been ‘simulating’ the cloud computing commercial model (pay-as-you-go, flexible terms, etc etc) for years. Indeed, we believe that many customers don’t actually care what the ‘physical’ implementation of their IT looks like as long as the commercial model stacks up.
So we are not in the least bit surprised to see that financial engineering still looms large in IT suppliers’ 'solution' portfolios, witness HP’s latest announcement for enterprise storage systems financing. If it looks like a cloud and costs like a cloud …