When it comes to marketing you could say that my head is in the cloud. Mind you, that only applies if you are in the IT industry and you know what a cloud is. In IT, cloud computing is basically infrastructure as a service. The servers, switches, storage, applications, you name it, are somewhere else and you don't need to own them to use them. You may not even care where they are as long as you can use what you need, when you need it, and achieve a lower TCO.

Of course, cloud computing has similarities to the early days of mainframe-based computing as well as the xSP and SaaS providers with a pinch of virtualization thrown in. I've helped sell all those technologies, except the mainframe. I may be dating myself, but I'm not that old. Here's the thing for all you cloud heads:

The cloud computing model you want your customers to embrace can also apply to your marketing. And there's at least one cloud marketing company that's inviting you to walk-the-walk as well as talk-the-talk. Of course, it's my marketing company (I'm not about to talk about some obsolete old-world firm.)

Marketingsage is a cloud marketing firm. Not just because its people know the buzz words, or even because they understand cloud-enabling technology. Marketingsage's entire business is modeled on the same value proposition that's making cloud computing so compelling in today's IT marketplace. Read on and you'll understand.

Marketingsage provides clients with a host of integrated marketing services as needed for as long as they are needed. Clients get integrated PR, advertising, SEO, email, creative and other services at the level of intensity they need and can adjust the mix of services they use on the fly. Recognize that? Change the words "PR, advertising, SEO, email, creative" to "processing, storage, provisioning, developing" and you'll get it.

With typical agencies you buy and manage what you need separately. It's as old school as buying a server, then a RAID, an operating system, host adapters, cabling and all the enabling application licenses from separate, barely compatible, vendors. Of course you also need to employ a crew to set everything up down the hall in an expensive, air conditioned, energy- sucking data center. Finally, once you've paid for it and gotten it all working together, you only use 10% of it. Not so smart, when all you really want to do is sell more of your widgets!

So is Marketingsage like a cloud provider? Yes, insofar as we can deliver an on-demand, flexible, relatively inexpensive, turn-key service. Yet, we are more than the sum of our parts because we have our own exclusive systems, including proprietary software, that increase our productivity way beyond that of typical, single-service agencies. Plus, everything is run by people who know what they are doing in the IT marketplace. In our world, that's generating sales leads, building brands, launching products and developing sales channels for businesses like yours.