At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference the company is providing market opportunities for hosting and communication service providers in the cloud computing space. John Zanni, general manager of worldwide hosting for the commuincations sector at the company said, “Microsoft sees service providers becoming more important as the cloud becomes more predominant. Given their experience in deploying and selling infrastructure and software as a service, businesses will depend on them for IT as a service.”

The MSFT global Small to mid-size business (SMB) IT and Hosted IT Index for 2010 found awareness of hosted services is increasing with 65 percent of SMBs using hosted software to some extent, while 73 percent of the remainder have considered it, compared with only 44 percent in the 2008 index. Of those respondents currently using hosted services, the business advantage attracted them: Almost 36 percent wanted to find ways to improve business productivity, while 31 percent did not have the resources to manage their IT.

In terms of opportunities for hosting providers, three out of four respondents have considered using hosting for IT tools. For instance, SMBs in China, one of the fastest-growing markets, are the most likely to have considered using hosted services for four different IT tools: backup, file-sharing and collaboration, e-commerce, and customer relationship management. In terms of the IT currently used by SMBs, e-mail is the most pervasive IT tool worldwide (95.6 percent), followed by backup tools (92.4 percent).

For service providers, lowering customer turnover is important for revenue growth and profitability as well as market share. Business customers using Microsoft Hosted Exchange, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and SharePoint when compared with those using basic POP or webmail services are less likely to leave a service provider. In order to further understand the impact of service adoption and churn, Microsoft commissioned a study of 695 SMB executives and technology decision-makers in the United States and Europe in early 2010 and found that SMB customers that use enterprise-class e-mail and other online communication and collaboration services change providers half as often as those using basic POP or webmail. This dynamic presents service providers with an opportunity to combine their existing network service offerings with enterprise-class e-mail to better serve their customers and improve their bottom line.

Netapp a Microsoft partner and unified storage provider was able to levarage Dynamic Data Center Toolkit to build cloud services based on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center. Other hosting service providers can use the same set of tools to offer enterprise-class data protection solutions for disaster recovery, clustered failover, and backup and recovery services to their SMB customers.

nGenX Corp., a provider of cloud computing and managed hosting solutions based in Overland Park, Kan., with customers in Chicago’s financial district, recently announced Guardian GeoCloud, an automated cloud service that will empower end users with complete control over their cloud-based infrastructures while lowering IT costs and management hassles. With the help of the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit, nGenX was able to work with NetApp to include enterprise-class disaster recovery in Guardian GeoCloud.

“A major concern of cloud computing among our customers is reliability, as downtime or lost data translates to lost revenue, a damaged reputation and halted productivity,” said Robert A. Bye, executive vice president at nGenX. “By integrating disaster recovery into Guardian GeoCloud, we are able to achieve the reliability that our customers demand, providing replication and failover of their virtualized environments to a remote datacenter. Moreover, our customers now have access to a level of disaster recovery and security traditionally only available to large enterprises, at a fraction of the cost.”