The Atlantic divide of cloud computing

Awareness of cloud computing may be growing and adoption may be on the rise but it seems the experts have different views as to who is better with the technology.

The US-based chief executive (CEO) of the Enterprise Strategy Group claimed Europe had the edge over its American counterparts due to the number of isolated markets within one region.

"Europe is significantly ahead right now and I think that is because of its provincial nature," he told IT PRO. "There is just more history in having to keep things segregated and different if you will."

"Europe has been a leader in being able to deliver cloud services and the US is catching up in a large degree to some of those capabilities."

However, the Irish-born marketing director of Intel in EMEA, Richard Curran, claimed the fragmented nature of Europe was both a help and a hindrance.

"One of the advantages of Europe is we are very fragmented [but] one of the disadvantages to Europe is we are very fragmented," he said.

Curran claimed you would get "spots" in Europe where companies would shine with their cloud technologies and this would help drive adoption of the both kit and best practices forward. However, he still felt the US was leading the way.

"Ultimately I see, because the markets are very different, they are probably expanding a lot quicker in America than they are over here but we need to follow," he said.

"If we don't, the [industry] will be a lot less competitive in coming years as we work towards global cloud services portfolios, where us Europeans will have to compete with the Americans. That is something we are going to be very aware of."

David Chalmers, technology director of HP's enterprise business in the UK and Ireland, thought both sides had their merits and it would depend on what form of cloud technology was being used as to who was doing better.

"We are seeing the adoption and use of the big public clouds, like Amazon, much more so in the US than in Europe," he said. "[Yet] Europe is much more heavily into the adoption of big private clouds with big organisations doing that much more quickly. It is a very mixed picture."

"It is difficult to say which is ahead and which is behind as it depends which mixture of technologies you want to talk about."

Read our special report to find out all you need to know on cloud computing.