Diesel Direct also shows why, except for frequent announcements of new customers for SaaS companies, news is thin about when or why mid-sized companies adopt the cloud.

"Enterprises might have the luxury of making strategic decisions about cloud or other technology," Golden says. "In mid-sized companies things are very tactical. No cloud evangelist is going around the refueling industry saying 'there are ways to solve this problem.' "Companies make tactical decisions to solve their own problems and, five or 10 years later, we'll all wake up and realize we've changed the way we do everything," Golden says.

Kevin Fogarty is a freelance writer covering virtualization, cloud computing, security and IT innovation. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinfogarty.

Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, on , and on .