With the launch of Microsoft's Office 365 this week, all eyes are once again focused on the cloud services industry. But companies are being coy about their cloud services revenues, and John Foley of InformationWeek says this is no longer acceptable.

Foley writes that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) "doesn't disclose revenues related to its cloud services," and "neither do Amazon, Google, or IBM." The lack of information is forcing CIOs to make assumptions about the long-term viability of cloud providers. Considering that Forrester Research (NASDAQ: FORR) pegs the public cloud market at $25.5 billion this year, there is certainly a lot of guesswork to do. And Foley notes that this is all complicated by differing definitions and categories of cloud computing.

This obfuscation is deliberate, with companies like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) lumping their enterprise cloud services together with other services. Foley complains that while IBM (NYSE: IBM) does say its cloud revenue in the first quarter was "five times what it was a year ago," the absence of a dollar value renders the information mostly useless.

For more:
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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