The best and brightest CIOs at the recent Everything Channel Midmarket Enterprise Summit (MES), the premier event for the midmarket technology cognoscenti, were clearly focused on moving to the cloud to cut costs, namely hefty software licensing fees and soaring server infrastructure costs.

Take note, Microsoft: The Google booth at MES was packed with CIOs looking to cut their Office and Exchange licensing fees. One of those CIOs, Randy Merle, director of IT for Red Gold, a premium tomato and food products company based in Elwood, Ind., has 450 desktops and some 800 users based on shifts. "We are always trying to figure out how to minimize our license fees," said Merle.

Merle is not alone. CIOs are more interested than ever in moving day-to-day commodity productivity products completely to the cloud so they have more time to focus on technology solutions that provide a competitive advantage for their business. They are actively engaged in redesigning business processes to either save money for the business or provide a better experience for their customers.

The job of the CIO has forever changed. It's now about getting to the sweet spot where they can provide high-impact business solutions. What CIOs are not interested in is solution providers or vendors knocking on their door looking to hawk products or asking them yet again: What are their pain points? If you don't know at this point with the economy in a free fall, then you have no business knocking on their door.

Solution providers looking to the cloud have a lot of choice, not only from major league vendors but from a long list of vendors such as NetSuite, BlueTie, Apptix, Rackspace and many others.

Matt Cain, a research vice president and cloud computing expert at Gartner, told CIOs at MES to expect a titanic battle from the likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM and soon Cisco.

Cain said the major vendors are all looking to capture a piece of the pie as midmarket customers move to the cloud for e-mail. "E-mail is the thin edge of the wedge and they are going to go parlay that initial e-mail account into much deeper application spaces and ultimately go beyond collaboration," said Cain.

That move to provide a full cloud experience is where the action is right now. Solution providers that are not moving aggressively here will be left behind. The challenge, of course, is to determine which vendors are truly interested in working with the channel. This is no small matter in a market where the lure of recurring monthly revenue more often than not leads to vendors pulling the rug out from under their so-called solution provider partners -- not a wise move considering the complexity of the cloud and the support issues involved.