James Governor of RedMonk blogs today about some figures he heard at an EMC event earlier this year. James reports that EMC (with a vested interest in the enterprise data center, of course) suggest an 80/20 split for private/public cloud use four years from now. Whilst there is clearly a place for both private and ‘hybrid’ cloud models for the foreseeable future, I cannot believe that the private will continue to grow at the rate EMC’s graph appears to imply. In the vast majority of circumstances, ‘private cloud’ is a stop-gap that enables continued exploitation of sunk investment in hardware, or a pragmatic solution that permits CIOs and others to gain confidence as part of a managed transition to something else. Except in a relatively small number of niche cases, Private Cloud is not the future.