Lumison CEO Aydin Kurt-Elli has just returned from the Gartner Datacentre Summit in Las Vegas. He reports: "This was a large scale conference with around 2,000 delegates sharing their views on everything that creates a strong business in this industry, from real estate to hardware and software.

Being Las Vegas it was no surprise to hear size matters to these folks. The sheer scale of what people in the US build is impressive and I'm talking datacentres, not gaudily-themed hotels. Even a "modest" healthcare provider, who covers just three or four states, for example, has a 60,000 sq ft facility and is currently building another three times the size.

But what is less evident is a cogent voice or strategy. Everybody is shouting about cloud computing, but one Gartner analyst told me he predicts 90 per cent of cloud start-ups will hit the rocks. Of course there is a lot of supply with cloud computing but that tells us the demand isn't what some vendors would have us believe. Private cloud - or the virtualisation of managed services - however, is set to soar he predicts. It certainly made me confident we're on the right track.

With such a focus on the green agenda at present I think it's also interesting to note the UK and Europe appear to lead the way on thinking in this regard.