By this time, every VAR in the industry should know that the cloud is raining money. It may not be a constant deluge, but the constant sprinkling from monthly revenues isn’t a bad business model. But to take advantage of it, there are two things a VAR has to consider: What type of cloud services are companies buying, and what should I offer?

The most attractive target for cloud services providers are new companies and start-ups. Existing companies, especially larger ones that have an installed on-premise infrastructure already, are less likely to want to move completely to the cloud because they are still depreciating their capital expenditures. An argument could be made that even with abandoning those capital investments, the cloud could still offer a financial advantage, but it’s a hard argument to make and there is other low-hanging fruit to be picked.

Just to highlight how incredibly powerful the cloud model is, Gartner made a prediction last year that by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets at all. Who is buying? Just about everyone. Even though those large companies may be putting off a cloud purchase because they want to fully capitalize their existing hardware, there is still an opportunity, and most larger companies will at least have a pilot program or two for the cloud. New businesses of course, which are not bound by any entrenched technology, are ideal candidates, especially if they are cash-strapped, which most of them are. And if you think about it, the cloud is probably one of the most small business-friendly technologies to come along in decades. For a relatively small amount of money, a small business can easily get set up with all the software and infrastructure they need on demand, all scalable to accommodate growth as it happens. You may not be getting million-dollar sales, but it’s not small potatoes. According to CompTIA, in 2010 80 percent of SMBs want technology that delivers an immediate payback and minimal disruption. Communications- and collaboration-based cloud tools will also gain a strong following among SMBs; and CompTIA’s study showed that 72 percent of SMBs have employees who telecommute.

With that in mind, VARs need to remember that there are three types of cloud computing: software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service. The PaaS offerings are more specific to developers, giving them an easy and inexpensive environment for developing custom apps with a web-based platform that has already been tested and proven. is an example. While selling PaaS to developers is certainly an opportunity, VARs that also specialize in custom development for customers will want to take advantage of PaaS technology as their own development platform. Casting a wider net, IaaS and SaaS cloud computing solutions offer opportunities to serve all types of customers. Virtually everyone needs some server and storage space and some apps.