All hail the ‘supercloud’

As Pearce himself admitted, this would require a significant amount of work and cooperation amongst vendors.

As we've seen in the cloud industry, even in its infancy, vendors aren't overly keen to ensure each other's technologies are open to one another. Citrix vs. VMware and Salesforce.com vs. Oracle, Microsoft vs. Google there are a number of ongoing cloudy battles.

Vendors, perhaps rightly from their own viewpoint, want their customers to use their products alone, regardless of what would benefit IT departments the most.

There's been much fuss around openness, yet the standards are still not there to guarantee this. It's another area of the IT industry, like things called iPad killers' or web privacy' (whatever they are), where there's plenty of talk and not enough walk.

For IT though, the idea of the supercloud would be a hugely attractive proposition.

"All of this technology can be automated, making it simple for IT to run once the initial conditions are set," Pearce added.

"Further policies can then be set, changing cloud vendor choice based on cost or other conditions such as geography."

Simply put, the supercloud model would truly deliver on the central selling point of cloud computing: flexibility. On the downside, a new PR term may have just been spawned. Apologies in advance.