Petteri Uljas is the CEO of Capgemini’s Finland office, which is responsible for the company’s operations in Eastern Europe and India. IT services is one of the many segments that the cloud, and the exec provided his own unique perspective on this matter in an interview with John Furrier at Intel Forecast 2012 (full video below).

Uljas starting out by emphasizing the separation between the evolution of technology and the actual delivery model that is the core concept behind the cloud. The underlying infrastructure does change, but it doesn’t necessarily have an impact on the same level.

He spoke from the Capgemini point of view on this matter, saying that one of the advantages that cloud-powered enterprises are benefiting from is faster deployment. Traditionally his firm has been contracted for relatively long term contracts that usually stretch across one to five years, and now some deals may be as short as a few days.

At the same time, Uljas believes that there’s a lot of room to improve. The notion of being able to seamlessly scale horizontally is not yet implemented to its fullest potential, and according to him one of the main reasons is the lack of standardization.

This gap also means that it’s much harder to draft a business case for a cloud deployment than for traditional infrastructure, and while scaling makes up for some of the complexities, that factor is non-existent when it comes to big data.  And this happens to be the next topic of discussion for Furrier and Uljas.

The Capgemini executive believes that this is yet another space that has a long way to go, and he believes that the same applies to the “as-a-Service” industry. The lines between the different models are still blurry, and vendors have not yet started to really differentiate themselves and offer more value that what we’re seeing today.

For the rest, including insight on how big data comes into play in global operations and a few other fields, check out the video below.