A plea for "no man's land" clouds

The growing interest of system integrators for Cloud computing has introduced the term private clouds. In addition, what used to be called just clouds are now called public clouds. After all, the idea of having your stuff somewhere on this globe isn't such a comforting idea to many people. And, to be honest, there's a lot more money to make by moving and operating it

I've spent some time lately thinking about outsourcing and offshoring. If it works, it's fine, but at some time contracts have to be reviewed and some other party might become the new provider of your iron or services

What happens then? Well, in short, a lot of money is spent. It's a good time to upgrade or replace
machines, (re)write installation and operating manuals, and everything is moved from one location to another. It's this last act that I'm not particularly happy about, because it doesn't add any value at all

Of course I have to move myself when I don't like a store, a garage, the company I work for, or the people I live with. So why do machines have to move from one external location to another? It would be a lot easier if the new people operating them would just move themselves to the external location. It's similar to moving Moses to the mountain or vice versa

It would make life so much easier. No big bang cut-over weekend, week or month, but just gradually face-lifting applications and machines on the spot in due time. Not dozens of parties involved undertaking all kinds of different activities for months and years, and no huge costs for establishing an entire datacentre that has to be marked down within 5 years

A company could own its own datacentre, albeit no core business, and even do some fun Clouding with it for other companies. It would save so much money! Companies need datacentres anyway, it's pretty much the same as B2B: not core business, but (very) business critical

And, after all, let's be honest: there's a lot of work more interesting than moving applications from outsourcing party A to B...