Half of Enterprises See Cloud Presence By 2010 update from December 2008

One of the cool features of the sessions at the Gartner Data Center Conference is the ability to conduct snap polls through mobile voting devices distributed to audience members. The demographics of the 2,000 attendees is heavy on enterprise IT and data center users, so these instapolls offer an interesting window into enterprise views on key topics.

One of the first polls today involved adoption of cloud computing. The question: When do you expect to use external cloud services in place of internal IT? Here's the response:

That means that 51 percent of the audience of enterprise users expects to be using external cloud services in some fashion by 2010. The balance of the responses were someplace between 2011 and "later."

UPDATE: It should be noted that these numbers may slightly over-report the percentage of enterprise organizations moving in-house apps top the cloud, as some companies may have several employees at the Gartner event.