Who is the cloud customer?

Will the real cloud customer please stand up? Most of marketing theory strives to correctly identity the "real" customer. Once the customer is identified it is a downhill task to cater to her/him. The problem is the real customer is always hiding. You would too if everyone wanted your money. Just like you don't answer the telemarketing calls at home and want to get on the do not call list, the real customer uses proxies to engage the vendors. In a cloud the customer is CIO who is still spending 84+% of his budget on fixed costs. That leaves him a mere 15+% to play with on his/her own discretion and most say of that only 5% is actually spent on innovation. His budget is under review every year from the CFO who has to keep showing a growing bottom line inspite of a flat to downward slopping top line. If you follow the S&P 500 companies where revenue growth for the last 3-4 yrs is under 5% (they are taking ORCL to the cleaners for missing even that today) and the divvys are expected to replace the lost income from the bonds (thanks to the pump from Fed), you will see very little room for the CFO to maneuver. Cloud offers the CIO more bang for the buck and hence this interest in cloudification of all assets. That pressure to reduce the fixed cost is driving software defined everything. Software can replace most of the fixed costs ('admins'), it can disintermediate the admin. This trend is driving a whole new industry in the area of configuration management and ever more user friendly self-service portals. So if you are designing a system that connects a super user friendly (read simplistic) to a sophisticated back-end (read complex system), you have to use a language that is different from the one you may have used to specify a menu driven desktop system.