Some of the most excited HPC vendors these days are the grid computing companies that are rapidly extending their portfolios for the cloud computing market. Companies like Univa UD, Cluster Resources and Platform Computing, among others, are hoping that their expertise in utility computing can be parlayed to address a much wider market. Across the industry, the attraction of delivering infrastructure and software as services has become irresistible. Unlike grid computing, which never attained widespread use, cloud computing is almost certainly headed for fame and fortune.
Two general trends are pushing cloud deployment to the front of every CIO’s to-do list: the falling price of hardware and the increasing expense of managing that hardware as a single resource. Managing infrastructure at scale is where the grid middleware vendors come in, and at this stage it is these companies that see nothing but green field between high performance computing and the rest of the commercial enterprise market.
http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/Surveys-Says-Cloud-Computing-Is-Awesome-52474502.html
It’s worth noting that no mention was made of the lack of standards as a barrier to cloud computing.