While I was at IBM Pulse this year, I had the chance to sit down with Lauren States who's title describes what she does quiet well: Vice President Cloud Computing for IBM's Software Group.

In this brief discussion, we cover several topics:

• Pulse 2009 cloud related product and consulting announcements
• Does Conway's Law apply to cloud setups?
• Mixing public and private clouds – one us it for spilling over peak workload to public clouds – use often begins with testing and QA and spreads closer to production deployments.
• The decision process Lauren has seen companies go through around public vs. private clouds.
• What types of applications – or "work-loads," even – has Lauren seen running on clouds? This gets us into some interesting talk of how verticals might driving cloud use with more tailored, SaaS-delivered applications.
• Cloud computing might drive simplification, standardization, and maybe just "good enough."
• Tailoring the operations vs. the user interfaces for cloud computing – a little more complex for ops people, but much simpler for users.
• The cost savings angle – internal IBM folks used cloud technology to bring costs down 83%.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and sponsored this video.