Although self-service -together with elasticity, pooling/sharing, etc. – is a defining attribute of cloud computing, many of the companies expressing an interest in cloud computing do not seem to be aware of that.
In fact, when asked: who do you expect to provision your services to the cloud?; who will monitor your services’ performance and availability? and; who do you expect to take action if something goes wrong?, a majority of the companies asked look to be somewhat surprised by the question, as they simply assumed that their service provider would do so.
This is a bit like going to a supermarket (a typical self-service facility), pointing to the ingredients you like and expecting the cashier to clean, cook and serve them for you. The name we generally use for such a service however is «restaurant» and it comes with significant different expectations and pricing, as demonstrated by the price of a bottle of the wine in a restaurant versus that same bottle at a supermarket (which is one reason restaurants prefer to buy from exclusive wine merchants and not to put bottles or their wine list that are available in retail).