Technically, there's nothing new about us posing the question, "what are the next steps hosting providers must take to capitalize on the opportunities available in the business?" From the 10,000-foot view, that's the basic premise that underlies just about everything the WHIR publishes or produces.

In this particular case, however, we're looking at it through an extremely significant contextual lens. That is, for much of the last two years, hosting providers have been operating in a business climate defined by an economy in crisis.

For the majority of 2008 and 2009, hosts were faced with an economy that was close to destroying major banks, insurance companies and automotive giants. For realists, the focus was on surviving, rather than on thriving.

Right now, the question of "what next?" has a special significance. Hosting providers are working to shift their businesses from a period of belt-tightening among customers to a new period of recovery, seeking to capitalize on opportunities in an ideological shift in the market toward IT outsourcing.

In this issue's cover story, Dennis McCaffery examines some of the steps a few big players in the hosting business took to weather the recession, and what they're doing now to position themselves for growth in the recovering economy.

Unsurprisingly, one of the main notes to come from that conversation is the idea that hosting providers should be rolling out solutions that address the exploding demand for cloud computing solutions.

Covering related ground, Wayne Epperson's feature on selling to SMBs addresses the urgings of the big vendors targeting the hosting business, that hosts set their sights on the vast market of small and medium-sized business customers. He mines some nuts-and-bolts type advice on how to go about characterizing, marketing to and providing for SMB customers.

An examination of data center giant Digital Realty Trust that I conducted myself looks at a company attempting to shift the way hosting providers view the data center by making the not-so-obvious - but very compelling - argument that designing, building and maintaining facilities is not a hosting provider's core competency.

Returning to that notion of looking for the opportunity associated with a threat, Esther M. Bauer examines the market for value-added services around protecting customer web applications from security threats, malware injections and denial-of-service attacks. The article examines a few security products designed to be packaged and delivered by hosting customers as part of an advanced set of hosting services, and looks at the market opportunities and profit margins for those services.

Unless you operate a woefully unprepared and unresponsive business, there's a good chance that you're already thinking about, or working on, adapting your business to address the fact that your customer's needs are changing to reflect the current economic conditions.

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