As NPRG points out in its recent report on data center strategies, the distinction between managed and unmanaged services is an important one for service providers entering the cloud services game from the telecom and IT space, since one of the advantages they might hope to exploit is an existing relationship with CIOs and IT managers. For providers of hosting services such as Rackspace, the co-existence of managed and unmanaged offerings is nothing new, as managed and unmanaged hosting services have been around for some time.

As cloud computing covers more ground, the services themselves will differentiate to the point that offerings on one end of the spectrum may bear little resemblance to those on the other end. Some offerings will be bundled with the network transport services of the provider; some will tout network independence – or the choice and redundancy of multiple networks -- as a selling point. Some will involve critical applications with real-time performance demands that require very low latency and thus are sensitive to proximity and physical distance; some, like Amazon’s, will be ambivalent to geography. Steve Smith, the CEO of Equinix, staked out his company’s turf in a recent speech to investors: “We’re most interested in proximity-based, high-priority apps; they’ll demand the lowest level of latency,” he said. “We’re less interested in cloud-based apps that are back office[-based] and don’t require density or choice of network.”

Some cloud computing offerings don’t even translate well from one customer size to another. Verizon Business had its own internally developed cloud computing service on the market for several months before it decided to add Terremark’s down-market cloud offering to its own portfolio,

Services aimed at corporate collaboration may focus more on low latency. Government customers are likely to dictate the specific geography of some cloud offerings, as Verizon illustrated by occupying a big chunk of the DC-area data center owned by Terremark, which gets much of its revenue from the feds’ aggressive exploration of cloud computing. And of course, services aimed at residential users will focus on entertainment and media – perhaps including content delivery networking elements as well -- with a particular view toward managing subscriber identities across a range of consumer devices. Meanwhile, momentum is also growing for open-source cloud computing; in January InterNAP, a provider of telecom and IT services, became the first to announce a major storage offering based on OpenStack, the open-source cloud-computing platform developed by Rackspace and NASA.

As the differentiating aspects of these services become more pronounced and better understood, it will be helpful for the industry to develop new terms that delineate their differences. What we call “the cloud” today will, in 10 years, go by many different names.