"We believe that virtualization actually unlocks cloud computing," declared Gartner's VP and Chief of Research of Infrastructure and Operations, Tom Bittman, speaking last Fall at Microsoft's "Get Virtual Now" event in Bellevue, Washington. "What the cloud is delivering is essentially virtualized services," Bittman added.

He continued:

"Now, on the other hand, we don't believe that that means we're all moving to a big change where everything will go out to the cloud. We actually believe that what's happening is we're seeing a transformation occur inside of IT, in addition to outside in external service providers, and that change that's happening inside of IT is moving them to become more, and more cloud-like. So in other words, I like to say that we're seeing this transformation both inside and outside of IT towards cloud computing...

Bittner wasn't finished yet with highlighting the 'elastic' qualities of The Cloud:

"So what do we mean by this transformation? We believe that we are moving from a world where we manage components, we manage silos, we did resource management, we did capacity planning, we did performance management within silos. That's how we did things. Sometimes we put automation tools on top of those silos, but they were still silos. And what's happening is we're seeing a fairly major change here, as we move toward virtualization, where we're moving away from components and toward layers, and toward pools, and moving toward this kind of model we're much more elastic, we can do things a lot quicker than we used to be able to do them, but we are not done yet. By itself virtualization doesn't finish the story."

The key attributes of cloud computing that Bittner contends tie it to virtualization are services-orientation, utility pricing ("whether it's subsidized, or I pay for it based on use"), elasticity ("perhaps massive elasticity"), and that it is delivered over the Internet.

"Of those attributes of cloud computing, the first three are identical to what's happening inside of [all] IT," Bittner observed.