Understanding customer needs is the basic skill required for success in the cloud services marketplace says Jeramiah Dooley, director of manged services for Peak 10 (http://www.peak10.com). Speaking on SiliconAngle TV (www.siliconangle.tv) from VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, he said, “I have been in so many situations in which other service providers have come in and told the customer, ‘This is the list of our services, now which ones fit your needs?’” That kind of approach doesn’t work for many customers.

Peak 10, a cloud manged service provider, operates 20 data centers in 10 markets in the U.S. Southeast, providing scalable hosting and managing of complex IT infrastructures for SMBs, including virtualization and cloud-based services. It was funded just before the dot-com bust of the early 2000s and built its infrastructure after the bust in part by buying surplus data centers and incorporating single data-center operators. It purposely follows a philosophy of operating multiple smaller data centers to achieve the flexibility to meet the varying needs of customers. That, says, Dooley, gives it a competitive advantage over large data center operators who need customers with a specific data density and service need.

Many of Peak 10’s customers are SMBs who come to it in part because they cannot attract the skill sets they need in house to meet fast-changing end-user needs for mobile services, high responsiveness, and the economical operations that virtualization provides.

Today, he says, “No one is questioning the relevance of Cloud services to business.” The question, he says is whether you need to keep your IT systems in-house or would get better service and higher flexibility at lower cost from the cloud.

“If IT is integral to your business, then I would say by all means keep it in house. But if your core competencies are elsewhere and IT is bolted onto the business or is a cost center, then the goal is to deliver the best service at the best value. In almost every case, outsourcing makes sense based on what you get and what you spend.”

However, every company’s needs are unique, and Peak 10 does a lot of hybrid services in which part of the system stays in-house and part moves to the cloud. It works closely with application providers, integrators and management providers. These have been early adapters of infrastructure-as-a-service.

The focus for much of the market, he says, is driving operational efficiency through the infrastructure. At Peak 10 that began with virtualizing its servers with VMware both to drive high utilization and therefore efficiency and to provide high levels of flexibility and responsiveness to changing customer needs.

Today Peak 10 is focused on desktop virtualization, which it sees as the next wave. “A lot of our strategy going forward is linked to VDI,” he says. “We believe in the VMware VDI environment vision, so that roll-out will be very important to us.”