From talking to a few data center operating execs — tier 1 and otherwise — we get similar numbers: 10% of their business today is cloud business (the rest is colocation and other forms of hosting).

What does this mean?

1. Early days for cloud.  Lots of upside still for cloud providers, both computing and storage.  Good long-term news for our companies Nirvanix, BlueStripe, and Solidfire,
2. Early days for cloud.  Bad news for immediate growth in these marketplaces.  20% is the magic number in many markets for when penetration starts to inflect.  Plausible to believe that’s close to the magic number here.  It could be longer than we would like to get from 10% penetration to 20%.

What are you seeing?  What do you think?