How long will it be before microbusinesses – companies with fewer than 50 seats – don’t need remote monitoring and management tools anymore because they do everything in the cloud and the only ones doing the monitoring will be huge companies like Google, Microsoft, and so on?

I got three types of answers:

1. Don’t worry, your clients are still going to need you as a trusted advisor. (That is reassuring, but it’s not what I asked. I know my clients are still going to need my services. My question is how long will they still need your services.)
2. Don’t worry, your clients are still going to be using computers that have to be monitored and managed until something really radical happens – something based entirely on thin clients and a return to the mainframe paradigm. (That wasn’t my question, that was my premise. When is that going to be?)
3. We’re not worried because our products will help you monitor and manage cloud resources, too.

That third one didn’t answer my question, either, but I thought it was an excellent point. When you move services to the cloud, you sort of take it on faith that your provider is doing what they said they would do. Even companies that rely on hosted mail, files, databases, intranets, and so on will probably need some third-party company to watch the services’ performance and alert the customer about problems. Some of the companies represented on stage already have this sort of monitoring deployed or on their road maps. I wonder if there were any guys up there thinking “uh oh …..”