So how big are the clouds and what percentage of companies currently use applications that run on cloud computing services?

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First big, public clouds wooed green-field startups.

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Clouds had started to build up, and clouds always mean big bumps.

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The speed, along with the management between public and private clouds, is likely to be a big differentiator IBM salesmen make against competitors like VMWare and Microsoft.

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Though there are certainly clouds (the current-account deficit is big, house prices are cooling, consumer spending is slowing and fiscal policy may have to tighten), GDP per head is now higher in Britain than in Germany or France.

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Such clouds would persist for an unusually long time because small water droplets are less likely than big ones to turn into rain.

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