At the recent ITEXPO West 2011 show in Austin, Texas TMC’s Group Editorial Director Erik Linask (News - Alert) had the chance to interview Verecloud’s VP of Product Development, Russell Wurth. He spoke about some of the interesting, exciting things surrounding cloud these days.

“One of the things we’re seeing is increased interest and adoption of cloud services by small businesses,” he said, noting that with the increased availability of such consumer products as tablets and smartphones, it’s easier for individual consumers to hook into the cloud, but the challenge for small businesses is finding what they need to run their businesses in the cloud, such tools as e-mail, backup, collaboration software, recovery, computing power and such tools.

Verecloud runs an app store catering to that need, simplifying the search process for SMBs to find such business-class cloud services, organized according to a best of breed, not best of suite model, Wurth said, “suitable for running a pet store or a 500-person branch office.”

Linask posed a good question -- how does one determine what, in fact, is “best of breed” when it comes to small business apps? After all, it’s a term we hear a lot, but rarely see an actual definition given. Wurth explained that for Verecloud, “it’s about performance. We select cloud providers who have high availability,” for instance. They also match their customers’ needs with regard to price point and feature offerings.

Just this week TMC had the news that Verecloud announced that it appointed sales and marketing veteran Jeff Hutcheon as executive vice president of Sales and Marketing. Hutcheon has more than 22 years of experience in sales and marketing leadership focusing on small and medium businesses, “managing and building sales teams that were responsible for $30+ million in annual sales,” according to Verecloud officials.

Wurth noted that the “installation” process for SMBs of the offering Verecloud finds is “so simple, really. Create a profile, swipe a credit card and you’re off and running.”

He cautioned that such an approach is “good and bad,” since there could be a great deal of “rogue applications” purchased without the authorization or even the knowledge of IT, which can cause confusion. So use carefully.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Feb. 1-3, 2012 in Miami, Fla. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.