Small business: A cloud computing opportunity?

There has been much ado about Rackspace's recent "cloud hosting" survey, in which it finds that small businesses are essentially unaware of services that fit that description. Specifically, the survey found that more than two-thirds of small businesses (not defined in the survey, unfortunately) have never heard of "cloud hosting".
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Several prominent bloggers, CNET's Dave Rosenberg and CloudAve's Krishnan Subramanian among them, have pointed out that the question asked may have courted the response received. To quote Dave:

Not too surprisingly, the majority of SMBs were not aware nor terribly interested in "cloud hosting." I suspect some of this had to do with the use of the term "cloud hosting" rather than an interest in moving toward hosted applications and infrastructure. I would argue that questions about using "the Cloud" versus "cloud hosting" would have come up with a different set of answers.

Good point, but I think there is more to this story.

To me, what this survey shows is not that small business has failed to grasp cloud computing, but that "cloud hosting" providers have done a terrible job of marketing to that segment. In other words, the sex appeal of enterprise sales models and their big individual deal totals has driven most providers to focus on strategizing on how to get the so-called "enterprise" market--which really means Fortune 1000 scale companies.

I understand why. On paper, those guys have the budget to spend big.

However, we also know that a large percentage of the early adopters of cloud services such as Amazon AWS are small businesses and start-ups. In fact, there is a "barrier-to-exit" for enterprises wanting to move to the cloud. So why not focus significant investment at courting the former?

What I'd love to see is various cloud providers (at all levels of the stack) creating programs that specifically advertised and marketed to mom-and-pop services businesses, manufacturing shops, and so on. Targets for volume should be impressive; 100,000 customers should not be a surprising goal. SaaS would probably lead the way, but opportunities to get custom Web applications via PaaS (perhaps through partners) or even IaaS when it makes sense should be at least tried in this vast marketplace.

Even with its flaws from a general cloud computing sense, the Rackspace survey is incredibly valuable. The customers are out there. Figure out how to go and get them.

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BY James Urquhart
Source：cnet

James Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is currently market manager for the Data Center 3.0 strategy at Cisco Systems. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

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