Unisys have scored a bit of a PR own goal in their campaign to get the world, plus dog, to use cloud computing systems.

Speaking of the wonders of Cloud computing Richard Marcello of Unisys told the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara that his company could “eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India."

Now while that might be a good thing in terms of cost based accounting, it is not the sort of headline that people really want to see. “Cloud based computing kills more US jobs... or we fired shedloads of Americans and replaced with with two Indians: Unisys.”

Marcello who is president of technology, consulting and integration solutions, really does not have to worry about PR, but one would think that the outfit would be a little more sensitive to staff needs during a recession. Marcello said that if IT outfits don't embrace the cloud and send their jobs to India they probably will not be around five to 10 years.

True, Unisys flogs Cloud Computing technology and the press release that winged its way from the conference had the headline "Unisys Brings Advantages of Cloud Computing to Clients' Internal Data Centers with New Secure Private Cloud Solution." So we expect that Marcello will be doing a hard sell on the idea.

However it begs the question, what did the dozens of US people in Unisys do before they were replaced by two cloud based Indians? How do the rest of Unisys staff feel about being treated as numbers which are good to delete if the technology shows up? Cost is not one of the main reasons people shift to the Cloud. Perhaps the main reason they are not interested is because they don't like handing over their data to two unknown Indians in a far flung part of the world.