The term IT-as-a-Service has been coming up a lot lately, in a blog article Read Write Cloud by Audrey Watters , the one she refers to at Dev Central by Lori MacVittie, and in keynotes from 451 Group analysts at the recent HCTS conference I attended.

I think they've got it right - which is why we have tried to provide these services from ENKI since it was conceived.  However, just like with the definition of Cloud, there is a lot of confusion around what IT-as-a-Service actually is. 

For example, Audrey has a block diagram showing monitoring and metering added to cloud in front of a push-button interface, but this isn't IT-as-a-Service: it's simply an improved cloud with some of the things that are currently missing from it added in - essentially the infrastructure 2.0 that Lori is speaking about.

If you have worked in a reasonably-sized company and used their IT department to support your work, what strikes you is not that it's NOT pushbutton but that is IS full service.  You do your job - which is generating value for the company - and they do theirs - which is deploying and managing the apps you need to do your job.   That's IT - as a service.

The advent of cloud technology has made this function in a company look dated because in the past it was slow to provide results, or expensive.  But the needs it serves haven't changed.  For example, the idea that the marketing department would manage its own servers in the cloud would seem ridiculous to them, even if some smaller companies do this now to save money.

I think the confusion about this is illustrated by one of the commenters on Audrey's blog, who wonders why IT-oriented folk would want IT-as-a-Service.  However, the customers for this service aren't IT folk; they're business people.   That is the ultimate direction of Cloud Computing: to democratize access to IT services.   And today's focus on the self-service cloud has gone part-ways down that path, but it can't get much further if it remains self-service, because it still requires someone to serve themselves from a resource that requires architectural, systems integration, systems analysis, and systems administration skills to use successfully: in other words, an IT department, or in smaller companies, a few "IT guys."

Where I think Cloud is going is that it will become a supporting technology for a revolution that will eliminate the need for an IT department in small to medium enterprises through on-demand services, and provide a powerful technology platform to make an IT department more effective in larger enterprises.  Today's cloud will stop being a product and become an enabling technology in a stack that provides IT-as-a-Service, or as Lori puts it, a "parfait."