Gartner states that CIO’s place virtualisation and cloud computing in the 1 and 2 spot in the annual Gartner CIO survey for 2010.

Let me paraphrase that and say “Private Cloud and Public Cloud”. As organisations move their internal IT operations into virtualised Environments and begin to see the benefits this will only serve to accelerate the adoption of public cloud vendor offerings from Amazon, RackSpace, Joyent, GoGrid and others.

We already know from a a Forrester survey last year that Enterprises are the surprise adopters of external clouds and we can expect to see increasing adoption of the tier 1 cloud providers (Amazon and Microsoft Azure) as these two companies are the only vendors with the global reach that will allow trans-national organisations (think Pepsi or Cola-Cola) to place their data within the appropriate legal boundaries for their various legal  jurisidictions they reside in.

Amazon lowered the bar for European cloud adoption last year with the normalisation of prices between Europe and the US and we an expect to see this trend continue as other vendors make the move into Europe.