The buzz in the tech arena recently has included a sizable dose of Cloud computing topics. While we’ve progressed well past a conceptual perspective, the Cloud remains an interesting topic and a hotbed of speculation and progressive thinking.

The spotlight at the center of the discussion shifts almost daily as a fervor of competition and development herald a bustling digital revolution. Cloud service vendors stand to reap a bountiful harvest as more adopters emerge in the corporate space. But from a high level view, the current Cloud marketplace represents a threshold still unconquered despite years of growth.

I came across an article on GigaOm recently that was not unlike cracking open a virtual time capsule and peering into the Cloud as a fledgling concept. In the article, author Gary Orenstein analogized the Cloud marketplace as a ‘three-horse race’, where each “horse” is one of the key Cloud service offerings: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

While Orenstein’s descriptions and postulations about each service and the merits of their application for business make sense, the true takeaway was his prediction that the next progressive step would be “Undoubtedly, a combination of all three deployment models.” That was more than 3 years ago.

Yet few have managed to attain the perfect ‘Triple Crown’ of successfully and efficiently offering solutions that compile the treasured triad into one neat package. (Or perhaps we’re not looking hard enough.)

On the contrary, the news of the day involves big players marketing aggressively with a single-channel focus, a trend well exemplified by Network World’s recent piece about four household-name heavyweights jumping into the PaaS arena. Google has been snagging plenty of headlines of its own lately too.

For those keeping score, the evolution of the Cloud marketplace might have proven a little tough to keep up with. Despite predictions and anticipations from 2+ years ago that combining services would not only be the brass ring on the Cloud vendor carousel, but also the natural denouement for an evolving marketplace. So which is better? Time will tell.

But there is still little doubt that building the perfect ‘Triple Crown’ Cloud offering would benefit Cloud-bound businesses greatly, and earn a tidy fortune for the vendor. However, such a model may never exist – at least not as it’s been previously conceived.

The secret is that it’s not really a “Triple” Crown. For a vendor to execute the marketing, distribution and delivery of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services concurrently, at least one additional critical component must bolster the bundle together: An internally-grounded core infrastructure with a broad scope of support. Think about it this way: Even if you had three hands in all, none would do you a bit of good if you had no backbone.

There is one caveat that seems to have been only scarcely discussed, and which could create a barrier to global tech titans from being able to offer up the ultimate Cloud combo: Location, Location, Location.

Thoughts of the Cloud computing space conjure up images of a largely atmospheric environment, free of the constraints of the physical world.  But the reality is less liberating, as proximity between vendor and client becomes increasingly important.

Successful Cloud marketplace competitors will be those who recognize and adapt to these subtle secrets. Our very own bWERX Inc., (the IT enterprise which helped develop eTransmittal into such a standout document management tool), represents this ambitious pursuit with a sound support strategy and local-focused IT management. No strategy is perfect, but we all know that every great formula has a few secret ingredients.