Muoki is right - The cloud means different things to different people. @David - You're bound to nauseate, when you refuse to accept a terminology that was probably not taught to you in class, Frank Gillett and Larry Ellison will not convince IT professionals to adopt another term to suite their opinions. e.g Google remains a cloud(there I said it!!) technology vendor because organizations can outsource mail server services from them, instead of having to deal with competencies and budgets of running their own data centres. Its the new term on the block..... you either work with it or stick to the old term (location-independent computing), like the guy who still grins at computers because he thinks they could only make his manual way of book keeping more difficult if not complicated.