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Tuesday’s second keynote presentation was a panel discussion on “Shaping the Cloud Opportunity: Vision and Growth for the Future,” moderated by Antonio Piraino of Tier 1 Research, with panelists Zane Adam of Microsoft, Stephen Cho of Google, Emil Sayegh of Rackspace and Daniel Burton of Salesforce.com.

One of the most interesting threads throughout the conversation – interesting because it sort of underpins the issue of cloud computing in general – was the ongoing effort people seemed to be making to ensure they were all talking about the same thing.

There were certain things upon which everyone agreed as a kind of foundation. For instance, that utility computing, especially long-term, is the goal – the “holy grail of computing,” said Burton – and that cloud computing, as it stands today, is a step along the road to what cloud computing, or utility computing is going to become.

Another thing they agreed on was that the question is not “cloud computing, yes or no?” Cloud computing is not, as Cho said, a religion. It’s a toolset that is appropriate for certain workloads, and there are other projects, specific pieces of code, says Sayegh, for which dedicated infrastructure is necessary.

Sayegh said, and everyone seemed to agree, that the shared hosting market might be a few years away from disappearing into the cloud.

A presentation meant to illustrate the cloud computing opportunity to (possibly shared) hosting providers did a good job of framing it as a threat. Particularly because the guys on stage also agreed that a hosting provider can’t just go out and build a massive, scalable multi-tenant architecture. You can’t just build a cloud.

So the opportunity here, seemed to be the suggestion, is in partnering with one of the people on stage (or Amazon, presumably).

It wasn’t perfectly illustrated how that partnership would look in any of these cases. You might have to do some leg work to actually get a sense for how you’re able to partner with them. Each of these companies is building its cloud solutions with the idea of partnering in mind, though.

(How that reseller model works, more specifically, is something I'll definitely bring up when I talk to Sayegh later today.)

As Cho says, there’s an opportunity for hosting provider to be the trusted advisor to their customers on which kinds of things they can have delivered over the network.

A shared hosting provider is a kind of integrator now (an integrator of building blocks, rather than a developer of platforms or applications), and there is an opportunity for hosting providers to integrate cloud computing platforms, applications and ideas for their customers.

Ultmately, however, the business model for hosting providers, moving into what you might call the cloud era, is not completely clear, nor is there a particularly unified idea of what that should or will be.

As Piraino says, you’re going to have to make a decision about cloud computing, and the time frame in which you’re going to have to do that is, roughly, now.