IT managers are likely to think that the cloud is not permeable in terms of launching operations for reasons beyond security - customization. Can two companies who's IT mantras are contradictory use the same cloud, and if so how would that affect the functioning of the companies as well as the cloud.
The short answer to this is that, yes, certainly companies with diverse IT philosophies, and hence applications can, and will use the same cloud. The good thing about the cloud is its ability to support fundamentals of distributed computing - communication and computation at a very fine granularity. What this means, is that put anything on top of the cloud, and it should give you a silver lining!
Of course this also means that we need a strong middleware that would be able to abstract, deposit, retract and process application granularity into processing and communication granularity. While the computation or processing part is well researched and worked on - through the ages of parallel processing, the communication part is what interests us, and we have some pretty nice ideas that make that happen.
The communication part aka virtualization is well established through our OE-model (optical+Ethernet), and it should be able to meet the requirements of generic cloud computing.
My gut is that we do need the control plane to be common - between the computing and the communication layers. The control plane has to have horizontal integration (ability to virtualize) and also allow vertical integration (ability to process distributed application chunks) in a pragmatic and efficient manner.
