Next week at MSPWorld there will be considerable attention paid to cloud computing, but not the generic cloud talk you may be used to hearing. The discussions next week will center primarily around cloud trends and how MSPs can capitalize on the private cloud movement, including IaaS. 
For some years now, the managed services profession has been engaged in a debate about how cloud should be used (if at all) within the MSP community. Today, while I believe very few MSPs are refusing to adopt or recognize the significance of cloud, there is an unsettled issue of what type of cloud delivery will be employed by MSPs to their customers. Let’s examine the issue further.
You can probably classify service providers into three categories when it comes to cloud computing.
Brokers/Agents/Resellers:
These companies are the modern day VARs (Value Added Resellers) of the cloud era. They deliver very little service of their own, with the exception of a minimal help desk function, and their primary business function is to promote one or a few cloud products, which tend to be public cloud solutions. Some examples of these public cloud products might include Office 365, Google Apps, CRM, and backup.
MSPs with Cloud Offerings
Many existing MSPs have already adopted cloud as an add-on product to their existing managed services offering. These companies have not, as yet, fundamentally changed their business models. Instead, they have augmented an existing managed services delivery model and included some cloud solution (either public or private) and are using it to supplement their revenue but not to completely replace it.
Private MSP/Cloud Companies
The last category consists of former MSPs and new cloud startups where the business model is chiefly to deliver a private cloud offering, sometimes with a managed service sometimes not. The chief distinction here is that public cloud plays very little into the business model for these companies; they instead rely on traditional managed services and/or private cloud as their primary flagship product or service and their entire sales and marketing strategy hinges on that model.
Looking at these three categories we can weight or assign a percentage of the market who have adopted these models. If pressed to do so here, I would say 30% of the channel are public cloud brokers, 50% are MSPs with cloud offerings, and a minority of 20% who have adopted a private cloud strategy as their primary model. Please note, this is not a scientific poll, just my educated guess of the market split.
Accepting these percentages, the next few years will be interesting to watch to see whether the 30% of the public cloud brokers grows significantly or whether the combined MSP and private cloud segments expand their ranks. Reducing the issue down even further, the question becomes whether private cloud does in fact take hold within the managed services professional community.
This will be one of the central themes of next week’s MSPWorld gathering.