Google Apps’ head of enterprise sales for the UK and Ireland has joined the ‘yes’ vote for the maturity of the cloud, saying he believes that cloud computing will go mainstream in 2012.

The industry has been debating the maturity of cloud computing for the last six months, with colocation and other providers saying they believe mainstream cloud adoption is still some way off.

Just this week Savvis’ new VP of cloud services Daniel Patton told DatacenterDynamics that he believes cloud is still in its early days as far as being classed as a market.

“[And] we are going to live here for a while for a variety of reasons,” Patton said.

“Customers have to get comfortable with the cloud, particularly the multitenant cloud and it takes a while to get to that model.”

Google’s Davies seems to, however, share the opinion of vendors such as VMware and Fujitsu who have been saying as far as they are concerned, cloud is already close to maturity.

At the Cloud Expo today in London, Davies said end users are already becoming familiar with the benefits of cloud through the use of consumer models, and will now want to take that into the enterprise.

“It used to be that the Blackberry had to be earned and it was like getting your wings,” Davies said.

“Now it is about having access to your stuff whenever and wherever and changing your device every few months not years. When people go to work they are demanding the same from day one.”

He said this is creating a huge shift for IT right through to the boardroom.

“Three or four years ago, the conversation with the customers was with the CIO and it was usually about total cost of ownership,” Davies said.

“Now it is with all the board mangers including the CEO, and it’s about change management, migration and security.

Davies’ views set a theme for exhibitors and speakers at Cloud Expo, most of which had a story to share or a service to release.

Hosting company Firehost said its first European cloud computing services are now running out of data centers in Amsterdam and London.

Proact, a European storage integrator and cloud services provider, launched its UK operations after rebranding its B2net service, which it purchased last year.

It also offers Cisco and Netapp’s FlexPod-as-a-Service.

While C4L and Infiniserv launched Virtual Private Server, Virtual Data Center and Elastic Cloud Computing which can scale to tens and thousands of virtual users and Datapoint launched its Katalyst COREcentre in the cloud, a call center offering that runs out of a Telehouse data center.