This is my talk I gave last week at Cloud Connect in Santa Clara. One slide that did not make the deck are the top reasons why people struggle with building private clouds

1. Management and operations process.
2. Culture
3. Funding Model
4. Service description and self-service interface

As my deck says, "I got 99 problems, but the tech ain't one"

1. Well articulated corporate strategy with phases (crawl, walk, run)
2. Engage existing automation teams for skills
3. Well-defined, achievable service definitions that are automatable, volume
4. Platform that does not lock into a specific hypervisor or cloud API
5. A team that is trained (with specific roles) on the solution so that they can extend it in combination with the vendor's services organization
6. Get into production ASAP to drive value and organizational learning
7. Union of OOB features and specific configurations for your environment.
8. Articulated strategy for integrating with certain existing/deployed IT assets, and using the new "Cloud" as a way to shed IT baggage
9. Recognition that your Cloud Management Platform is extensible to other areas in the IT strategy and that partner products may be necessary as well
10. Have a suite / framework so you can maintain in the long term. And use external resources
11. Need clear articulation of career paths once you start removing "button pushers." design, operations, not implementation
12. Focus on process outcomes, not process activities. Or end up with innefficient processes