Cloud computing can be a worrisome concept for customers. Confidential business data sitting on a server somewhere on the internet does not inspire immediate confidence. Solution providers are selling metered application services like software as a service (SaaS) that work in a cloud computing model, but even the steady adoption of SaaS has been gradual.

All this could change, though, as new business collaboration solutions arrive that leverage cloud computing and SaaS in order to be more pervasive. With business customers looking to reduce costs and run more efficiently, a resulting boom in business collaboration solution sales could make cloud computing more mainstream.

Cisco Systems' WebEx conferencing platform and Microsoft's SharePoint and video streaming software are just two examples of collaborative solutions that leverage cloud computing, says Timothy L. Barto, vice president of marketing at Troubadour Ltd., a Houston-based solution provider that recently launched its own cloud computing offering.

"A lot of the customers of collaboration tools are already comfortable in using software as a service," Barto says. Ultimately, cloud computing is not as drastic a swing away from client computing as it appears, he says.

For instance, IBM's recent LotusLive offering delivers e-mail and business calendaring applications from an internet- based cloud model, and Microsoft has added cloud-based features and support tools to its Business Productivity Online Suite of collaborative wares. Novell Teaming + Conferencing also leverages cloud computing.

"Organizations are combining external clouds with internal clouds and trying to create a ubiquitous experience for the end user," says David H. Priebe, senior technical support specialist at Ingram Micro.

The attraction? Cloud computing eliminates many capital expenditures such as on-premise servers, and reduces the cost of licensing and maintenance while freeing IT personnel to perform tasks with higher ROI, Priebe says. But the major cloud players -- some of which, like IBM, Microsoft, RackSpace, Amazon and Google, also offer collaborative products -- must make their frameworks more flexible to provide more opportunities for solution providers and ISVs.

In the meantime, solution providers can build their own cloud in the form of an expensive NOC, or they can partner with a service like Ingram Micro's Seismic, which gives them the means to deliver to customers a range of collaborative products hosted atop a secure, third-party NOC that delivers the needed cloud computing platform.

For example, Ingram Micro partners can now leverage the distributor's Seismic platform to deliver, in a cloud computing fashion, hosted Microsoft Exchange 2007, Office Communications Server (OCS), SharePoint 3.0, and Dynamics CRM from Intermedia, which hosts Microsoft Exchange services. Announced in October, the partnership between Intermedia and Ingram Micro illustrates the flexibility of cloud computing to allocate computing and application resources dynamically across the internet without the constraints or cost of deploying an additional data center.