The chief technology officer of retail giant Marks & Spencer, Alan French, has lamented the pricing structures used for cloud computing services, claiming it is stopping the company from moving its order processing platforms to the cloud.

French said that Marks & Spencer now processes almost five billion transactions per year but, while many other parts of the retailer’s IT infrastructure has moved to the cloud, this area has proven impossible to shift due to prohibitive pricing curves.

“As we buy new software, we are pushing hard for it to be available as a service,” he said at the Cloud World Forum event in London, attended by V3.

“Almost all of our suppliers assume that there is a simple, linear link between the scale [and] cost. We’re running through close to five billion transactions per year; we’re not going to pay for it on a transaction basis and we’ll have difficulty paying for it on a per gigabyte basis.”

French urged IT suppliers to find a way to meet the needs of the firm: “The big challenge is this: Give us a deal we can buy. Our volume currently prohibits us from moving into software as a service.”

M&S has already moved all of its email into the cloud as well as many of its other operations, but as yet, French does not see the cloud as a one-size-fits-all solution.

“There isn’t a silver bullet. There’s clearly a lot of value in it but it requires work. Our sotware suppliers need to invest in software as a service. What they need to do is find a commercial model that works,” he added.

French’s comments are interesting as they appear to represent a change in the problems seen by CTOs with large-scale cloud deployments; rather than security or viability, cost is now a barrier standing in the way of migrating to the cloud.

No doubt firms such as Microsoft, Salesforce.com and Oracle, which recently signed some notable cloud-related agreements, will be keen to try and meet the IT chief’s needs with their cloud product portfolios.