While the all blue-sky picture about cloud computing shows smiling new IT professionnals making IT better aligned on business, it is only the nice side of the coin. In the real world, while less people will be needed to run the systems, more and more people will have to be employed to monitor contracts, SLA's, to check which cloud operator is buying out which, to make sure the data doesn't sneak away to some country where law is less touchy about, say acces to medical records by health-insurance companies, etc... These activities in an all-clouded infrastructure are due to occupy many an FTE.

So IMHO believing that the cloud will make so many IT'ers available for better enduser service might be just a bit shortsighted.

By the way, who runs the systems at the cloud operators' ?