• An IT guy in the room
• When I’m getting a new cell phone (to prove I’m smarter than the sales guy)
• At the hotel bar (preferably after the conference)
• In seat 2B when seat 2A is occupied by someone much better looking than I

But here’s a suggestion. Let’s concentrate on solving our problems and achieving the desired outcome and not focus all of our attention on HOW the problem is solved. Doing so will get us thinking about all the options for getting the desired result. Maybe its SaaS, maybe its an appliance, maybe it’s a custom app or ff you happen to work in a city where it costs you 10 bucks a week for knowledge worker, maybe your application integration is a shared desk with a set of in and outboxes. Maybe your database is a very tall and thick file cabinet. All you really do is keep your workers performing at a high level (meeting SLAs), have a group of other workers validating the result (Validation) and you lock the front door and if sometimes you lock the file cabinets. (Privacy) Oh and by the way you still have a successful, growing business and your R&D budget is twice your IT spend.

It’s all about the result. For example my colleague David Mitchell Smith (Cloud guru) prefers red wine. David Cearly, (another Cloud guru) prefers single malt scotch and I prefer a tall frosty 40 oz. bottle of Ole English. At the end of the night we all get a little tipsy and that’s the desired result; who cares how we get there. OK maybe that’s not a good analogy. OK here’s another… You need visibility into your sales pipe and your IT shop says they need to integrate Salesforce.com with you backend SAP system. They want to do this with an appliance from Cast Iron, fine. Or maybe they prefer to do so with Software AG’s webMethods Fabric, that’s cool too. You just want to know how much it will cost, how fast it can be done and most of all you want a guarantee that the result is visibility into your entire sales pipe. By the way I don’t unilaterally advocate one approach over the other (different strokes for different folks, call us if you really want our recommendation), all I really care about is that you get the results you want.

This is what makes Cloud Computing so cool. Since I get what I need as a service, I’m reluctant to care about what’s underneath. All I care about is getting my result, correctly, securely and on time. Some may say this is overly simplistic but those are the same folks who check their power transformers, wood poles, underground piping, CAT 5 converters, and transformation drums (don’t ask). I prefer to leave all that stuff to the electric company; holding them responsible for when my “frige don’t get cold and lights don’t turn on”.

So from my pickup truck in front of the feed store in Tampa, I offer my “down south county boy” mantra for all you consumers of Cloud services:

• I don’t care how you do the transformation, just GIT ‘ER DONE, and GIT ‘ER DONE correctly.
• I don’t care how you do the workflow GIT ‘ER DONE and make sure it gets to whom it supposed to, when it’s supposed to.

• I don’t care if it’s a web services or a FORTRAN script, GIT ‘ER DONE
• Encrypt the hell outta it, leave a junkyard dog by the servers running the Oracle apps, heck even require your employees use that fancy iris scanning authentication, I don’t care just GIT ‘ER DONE and GIT ‘ER DONE securely and protect my stuff!

Seriously think about the outcome and its impact on the business. Think about the business process and the business service. But don’t get bogged down on the implementation until you figured the rest out. Yep the devil is in the details, but don’t confront him until you have to.