Provocative predictions for cloud computing: How realistic?

I was taken back a bit by this recent article talking about some big predictions from Gartner around the adoption of cloud computing:

Cloud computing will become so pervasive that by 2012, one out of five businesses will own no IT assets at all, the analyst firm Gartner is predicting.

The shift toward cloud services hosted outside the enterprise’s firewall will necessitate a major shift in the IT hardware markets, and shrink IT staff, Gartner said.

This is very interesting to me, considering that many new and small businesses are finding a great deal of value in moving to cloud computing. However, I’m not sure I agree with Gartner over the amount of movement that will occur by 2012. Sorry to once again be the buzzkill, but a sure way to bury a space is to overhype and underdeliver.

Don’t get me wrong: Cloud computing will have an impact. I suspect that most midsize and small businesses will use e-mail and document management systems that are outside their firewalls. We’ve seen a lot of movement in this direction in 2009, and with the rapid expansion of Google Enterprise services and the emerging online version of Microsoft Office, this trend will only accelerate.

At the same time, major enterprise systems are now SaaS-delivered, platform-as-a-service is giving open source platforms a run for their money, and infrastructure-as-a-service is becoming much more compelling when considering the technology, as well as the business case. Things are actually moving along nicely.

However, “no IT assets at all” by 2012 in one out of five businesses? That’s a huge shift in a short amount of time. While analysts and thought leaders love to make revolutionary statements such as this because they are provocative, in the real world most businesses, large and small, are still struggling with the place that cloud computing will have in their IT strategy, and they are far away from complete outplacement of major IT assets. In other words, I appreciate Gartner’s enthusiasm, but I don’t see it based on what I’m seeing with my clients or in the industry in general.

I suspect that most of you agree with me, but I would love for you to chime in.

This article, “Provocative predictions for cloud computing: How realistic?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.