This is a bigger deal than most people think. Government has been clamoring to use the the cloud, but couldn't because of security reasons. Every government consulting shop will try and sell this to their clients.
As someone who works in Government in Australia in a non-IT area this is a huge deal.
So much of what we do is simple database - form type applications. To be able to develop these in a more agile, less pay IBM a billion dollars type way, will revolutionise IT in Government.
If you work for the government in Australia, you probably want the OPPOSITE of what this is - cloud servers hosted entirely outside the USA. If the servers are located in the US, they are potentially subject to the US patriot act, and i doubt that would pass Australian government privacy regulations
I'm pretty sure he was simply using his position as the background to why he has that opinion, not suggesting that non-US governments will look to use it.
Obviously for the Australian government we would need an Australian version of this or a similar service.
Government IT procurement for fairly trivial systems cost unbelievable amounts of money. A lot of this is due to an overly rigid scoping and dev process.
