I have been working on some cloud services projects, including go-to-market strategy. These 9 little slides are what you need to be thinking about when you are entering the cloud market. When I spoke with Sonian CTO Greg Arnette yesterday, one thing that he said that crystallized it for me was: like Netflix, Sonian built from the ground up to be a cloud company and wrote code to take advantage of cloud infrastructure like AWS. This is very different from sticking a box in a data center and calling it cloud.

Everyone says that cloud services are cheaper. There a a few TCO studies that will shoot that down quickly.

Cloud is not about cheap. It is about flexible. It is about high availability and high demand. If your cloud services are not impacting the customer's business, improving their process or making them more efficient, then you are doing it wrong.

Educate - your market, your employees, your industry. There is so much hype around cloud - and much of it is vague or wrong. Education will be the key to revenue. But to educate you have to have a Vision for what your service will do for its customers. What the Outcome will be. What the User Experience will be like. (And how you will On-board customers so that they have a positive UX).

It will have an affect on the organization, but only if there is executive buy-in to the changes that will happen when the business goes cloud. (It shouldn't be business as usual after the migration, so the management and employees better be prepared and educated on what that change will be like and what it impacts).

As many cloud companies know, it is easy to get started -- but very hard to make revenue. Everyone hates the sales guy, but without him nothing happens.