Many vendors and commentators feel that the SMB market is a natural for IaaS computing because of their lack of large, highly skilled IT staffs. Sometime next year everyone will realize that removing tin still leaves plenty of challenging IT problems, and cloud computing delivers a few new problems besides. Once that realization sinks in, everyone will agree that SMBs are a natural fit for SaaS and that only larger companies should imagine themselves as IaaS users. Consequently, SaaS providers will gain an even higher profile as adoption rates increase. However, SaaS will by no means be only an SMB phenomenon -- far from it. SaaS will become the default choice for organizations of all sizes that wish to squeeze costs on non-core applications.

The attractiveness of a complete open source cloud computing software stack will become clear, and interest and adoption worldwide of OpenStack will grow during the next year.

I'm generally pretty skeptical when large companies like RackSpace create open source projects, as they often smack of , wherein Tom got a bunch of other kids to do a chore he didn't feel like executing himself (viz CA and Ingres). The right (and only) way to do something like this successfully is to launch and support an open source project, while (and this is crucial) building a community of participants who take part to fulfill their own objectives (viz IBM and Eclipse).

Thus far, Rackspace appears to be leaning toward the IBM model. The power of a community-based open source initiative can be seen in Linux, which does it brilliantly, and OpenStack could become an analogous project that provides a free and extensible cloud platform. For budding CSPs in emerging economies, an inexpensive platform is crucial, and OpenStack will prove to be an attractive option. For CSPs in developed economies, OpenStack can provide a path to high-quality software without taking on the entire burden of development.

Much of the angst about what form of cloud computing end user organizations should use (see End User Predictions below) doesn't exist in emerging economies. Most companies have no significant installed base of infrastructure, so the urge to repurpose existing hardware (or, more realistically, avoid prematurely writing off undepreciated assets) is not relevant.