I am amused by the apparent competition over which analyst firm can predict higher cloud adoption rates. It’s not that I don’t trust Forrester or Gartner (and, honestly, I haven’t seen either report), it’s just that I don’t know if many businesses really have a grasp on cloud computing. A Rackspace survey releases in January, for instance, showed that while only 27 percent of small businesses in the United States were familiar with the term “cloud hosting,” 38 percent were either already using it or planning to use it (someone needs to explain that math to me). Before adopting cloud, smart companies will engage consulting services to figure out what they actually mean by “cloud computing,” and how it might actually help them.