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Rackspace’s recently published survey on Cloud Hosting tells us that Small Businesses are unaware of the term compared to mid sized businesses. Before I offer my take on this survey, I want to point out something else. When I read the Read Write Web’s post on the topic, I felt that the article wrongly paints a view that small businesses are unaware of the term Cloud Computing itself while the actual survey asks about Cloud Hosting. Here is my suggestion to bloggers. Already there is quite a bit of confusion about the Cloud terminologies. Let us not confuse further by giving room to more and more misunderstanding.

Having said that, let me jump into the results of the survey and offer my take on that. As soon as I saw the survey document, I thought that the results are a bit skewed due to the use of the term Cloud Hosting. I am sure small businesses owners are consuming Cloud Computing, mostly in the name of SaaS. We have to remember that most of the small business customers have their website hosted in a shared hosting environment. Many of them don’t even need a dedicated server to host their website. If these people are asked about Cloud Hosting, they will, obviously, be unaware of the term and the technology. The very fact that the survey results points to a higher number of people knowing/using Cloud Hosting only confirms my suspicions about the survey.

In fact, CNET’s Dave Rosenberg points out to the same.

Not too surprisingly, the majority of SMBs were not aware nor terribly interested in "cloud hosting." I suspect some of this had to do with the use of the term "cloud hosting" rather than an interest in moving toward hosted applications and infrastructure. I would argue that questions about using "the Cloud" versus "cloud hosting" would have come up with a different set of answers.

Let us not get unduly worried about surveys that asks irrelevant questions to small businesses. When they don’t even use a dedicated server, and are quite content with shared hosting, why are they going to get excited about a highly scalable, redundant infrastructure? However, if we broke down the terminology and asked them if they use email systems like gmail or online calendar applications or manage their tasks online or use invoicing tools like Freshbooks or Zoho Invoice (disclaimer: Zoho is the sponsor of this blog but this is my independent analysis), etc., we might end up getting better numbers in the survey. Asking about infrastructure to small businesses makes very little sense to me. Rather, I would be happy to check out a survey on SaaS conducted with a small business audience.

This doesn’t mean that I dispute the findings of the survey. In fact, a company in India did a very informal survey with small businesses in India and Asia Pacific. They also came up with miserable numbers like Rackspace survey. I do agree with the analysis of RWW that the Cloud Computing is not a household name in the small business segment. Here is my take on why it is the case.

• There is quite a bit of confusion on the very definition of the term Cloud Computing. If you put 10 people with the knowledge of Cloud Computing in a room, they will come up with 20+ definitions on Cloud Computing.
• Various approaches to the Cloud Computing taxonomy is another major reason for creating the confusion. The various IaaSes, SaaSes and PaaSes only adds to this confusion.
• Even if we take the case of infrastructure environment, any company that can set up a virtualization environment makes claims about being a cloud vendor.
• The Cloud era was preceded by the Web 2.0 era which already had quite a bit of confusion in terms of conflicting terminologies.
• The fear mongering tactics of traditional software companies and the deliberate attempts to confuse users with terms like Software + Service and Rich Internet Applications are also a reason for slow adoption.

As long as cloud community itself has trouble settling the definitions and taxonomy, it is going to be difficult to get small businesses embrace the clouds. We need a clear message to entice them and make them jump into the Cloud bandwagon. It is time for us to improve the signal to noise ratio in this field and focus on helping small businesses understand how cloud computing will help their business.