Who will dominate the cloud in the future?

Who will be the winner of the cloud computing technology? My answer is ONE of the the system vendors, maybe two of them. They will create virtual monopolies via cloud computing.

In analogy to a chess game, the pawns to advance in the field will be the private clouds. Thus we will have

X + X customers' private clouds = X ecosystem cloud

where X= SUN (Or whatever SUN will be called in the future) , or IBM, or Dell, or HP.

X can not be Microsoft, or SAP and it is paramount to have the ability to sell hardware as part of a turnkey private cloud .

X assumes also that X will create an AWS EC2 me-too service. There is no reason IBM, SUN, Dell or HP not being able to build an Amazon alike service.

Why would X customers buy private clouds? To offer their service to their users as fast as possible after taking delivery.

The winners will be the X ecosystem who places most “pawns”, i.e. private clouds in the field. The prize is huge:

$ from selling private clouds solutions
$ from selling virtual resources on demand (CPU, Memory, Storage)
$ from selling software licenses on demand
$ from new subscription services, yet to be creatively discovered

The project RESERVOIR has the noble and altruistic goal of offering a grand solution for the interoperability of all clouds infrastructures via open source. But what is the motivation? Everyone in Cloud Computing is after the money that can be made or the money that can be saved. So the RESERVOIR project, if successful, will be customized by various players, and particularly by the system vendors. The cloud ecosystems they will create will have some proprietary features to protect the X ecosystem.

According McKinsey report, clouds are nothing but virtualized software packages. They must have something more: an accounting system to handle the billings from the users and accept bills from X system cloud who supplied the private cloud.

Once the System seller has a dominant ecosystem cloud with its customers, Alea Jacta Est (The Die Is Cast)