A new study out of Infonetics Research reveals a little about who’s sitting at the cool kids’ table in the cloud provider cafeteria.

Microsoft Corp, IBM and Cisco Systems are on the short list for homecoming king top cloud service provider, according to Infonetics’ recent survey of 107 North American enterprise IT decision-makers. The analyst firm did note, however, that other “unexpected vendors dominate the cloud landscape in key technology deployment areas.”

Sorry, Google. They’re just not that into you.

Keep in mind the sample size is pretty small, and the group surveyed appears to be overwhelmingly made up of die-hard cloud supporters; 91% of respondents interviewed said they use cloud services today, and 100% expect to use them by the end of 2014.

Still, some other data points seem to ring true: Software as a Service (SaaS) was the most popular cloud service adopted (our survey revealed the same thing), and the leading drivers for adoption now are “application performance and management of IT costs.”

“There is no doubt, the cloud has come of age,” said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics, in a statement. “While investments in cloud outsourcing are small in comparison to internal IT/data center spending, they are growing each year, with the number of enterprise organizations turning to cloud technology to manage budgets and transform service delivery increasing significantly in the last two years.”

Although the cloud still has its skeptics, some new research from International Data Corporation (IDC) suggests their influence is going to dwindle — and fast.

Global spending on public cloud IT services is expected to exceed $40 billion by the end of this year, IDC reports. By 2016, cloud spending will approach $100 billion.

Over this four-year period, that represents a 26.4% compound annual growth rate. That’s five times as fast as the IT industry overall, according to IDC.

Which cloud services are going to be the hottest markets? IDC says Software as a Service (SaaS) will “claim the largest share” of cloud services spending over the next five years. Interestingly, however, cloud storage and Platform as a Service (PaaS) will grow faster.

This probably comes as no surprise to cloud providers. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is on track to become commoditized (if it hasn’t already), and cloud providers are recognizing that selling SaaS and PaaS will be more profitable over the long term.

From a geographic perspective, the United States will occupy the largest share of the cloud market, IDC reported. Following closely behind the U.S. are Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region (minus Japan). But the fastest-growth area for cloud spending? Emerging markets, whose “collective share [will] nearly double by 2016 when it will account for almost 30% of net-new public IT cloud services spending growth,” according to IDC.

It sounds pretty obvious, right? Whether you’re trying to close a sale or just get a foot in the door, of course you should understand the requirements and limitations of your specific customers and market segment. As well-seasoned channel vets know, this is especially true in the SMB market. And with SMBs expected to be at the start of the cloud adoption curve, this dogma should be top of mind for cloud providers.

But for some longtime hosting providers and network operators trying to get a foothold into SMB cloud services, this mentality is somewhat of a lost art, according to John Zanni, vice president of service provider marketing and alliances at Parallels, which hosted its annual customer summit last week in Orlando. After years of selling what eventually became commodities — bandwidth and rack space — some of these providers must now revisit their sales and marketing strategies because remaining competitive is no longer just about price and technology, Zanni told me in a recent phone interview.

“To be able to continue growing and profiting, you need to be able to offer services beyond those horizontal services,” Zanni said. That means focusing on specific segments within the SMB market, which “is just an expertise that most of [those providers] did not build,” he added.

The backdrop of our conversation was a recent survey Parallels published about the SMB cloud opportunity, the 2012 Parallels SMB Cloud Insights Report, which proved that market segments are far more nuanced “enterprise vs. SMB” or “healthcare vs. financial services.”

For example, one way the survey sliced respondents was by size: micro SMBs (1-19 employees), small SMBs (20-99 employees) and medium SMBs (100-1,000 employees). The survey also analyzed results based on a company’s IT resources and cloud adoption attitudes, but let’s just look at size for a moment.

When respondents were asked to select multiple reasons why they would keep their servers in-house, as opposed to SMBs adopting IaaS:

• Security concerns were a far bigger reason for so-called medium SMBs (about 80% of them) to avoid IaaS, versus about 30% of micro SMBs. A similar discrepancy between the two groups was evident for the response, “specific applications need to be in-house/other technical concerns,” with about 60% of medium SMBs identifying it as a reason to keep servers in-house, versus 25% of micro SMBs.
• Size doesn’t always matter. All three groups (micro, small and medium SMBs) showed near-equal concern about issues around pricing (60% of each group said it was a factor), unfavorable recommendations from a trust consultant/IT staff (14%) and bandwidth/connectivity issues (10%).