[digi_owl]

Sounds akin to the outsourcing binge that went on a decade (?!) or so back.

Back then it seemed most companies did it not because they had done the numbers, but because a few big names had done it and so the others did it to apparently piggy back on the stock markets attention.

[bnolsen]

in fact it is related to outsourcing. in the past outsourcing processing involved shipping drives of data overseas. The risk and schedule hit were big, the offshore companies had crap hardware that usually cost a lot more than it cost in the US. That quieted down for a while. The new cloud stuff got these people interested again in processing outsourcing, only now the data is shipped to google.amazon/whoever and the outsource employees use the cloud vms to run the processing. I wonder how long before this mini trend starts slowing down when they finally figure out that management overhead and poor communication is in most cases the main problem with outsourcing.