Where Providers Can Make Money In Cloud Services, Now

If you agree with the notion of product life cycles, then you might also agree that new technologies have adoption cycles, and "hype cycles," as well. 


The Gartner notion of how technologies develop incorporates the notion that a period of high expectations normally is followed by period where those initial hopes are dashed, eventually followed by a period where innovations are well understood and adopted.


You might argue that most of the money will be made once that occurs. If so, you might expect that email has been mainstream and throwing off substantial revenues for a while, and is maturing. 


Cloud-based advertising (think Google) and cloud-based sales force automation (think Salesforce.com) and other software as a service apps are in the full deployment stage. 


Infrastructure as a service is getting close to full deployment and acceptance. Public cloud storage has a ways to go before it will reach full deployment, though.