Tone-deaf Unisys official on why cloud computing rocks

Or what shouldn't get lost in all the puffery over cloud technology

Here's Richard Marcello of Unisys extolling one of what he sees as the virtues of cloud computing yesterday at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara:

"We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India."

Those actually U.S.-based jobs presumably were held by actual Americans trying to feed actual U.S.-based families.

And what does "kind of" mean?

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Marcello's title is president of technology, consulting and integration solutions, not director of public relations, but you might expect that by now industry executives would be better at finessing such a volatile topic. Advancements in technology have been eliminating (and creating) jobs since the invention of the wheel, of course, but the pace of such disruption these days combined with years of recession and an overall dismal U.S. job market call for a certain degree of tact if not empathy.

Instead, Marcello decided to offer a lecture when interviewed after his keynote by InfoWorld's Paul Krill: "If people don't embrace cloud computing," he intoned, "I don't think the companies will be around in 5 to 10 years. I think you have to take that broader, holistic view."

It's worth noting that Marcello's company, Unisys, is a major cloud-computing vendor, a platinum sponsor of the Cloud Computing Conference, and, that it made a news announcement at the event, headlined this way in a press release: "Unisys Brings Advantages of Cloud Computing to Clients' Internal Data Centers with New Secure Private Cloud Solution." From that release:

Recent Unisys research has consistently shown that security concerns are the leading cause of enterprise and individual users' hesitancy in adopting cloud computing. The most recent findings of the Unisys Security Index, a bi-annual global study of consumer opinion on security-related issues, showed that a significant percentage of respondents worldwide were uncomfortable about having their personal data controlled by a third party without assurance that the data could be kept secure.

In other words, these decisions aren't always as simple as handing the keys over to two folks out of India.

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