I was invited to participate in a panel discussion regarding cloud computing at the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference in Phoenix this past week.

The event attracted a cross-section of young people seeking to build careers as entrepreneurs, older people hoping to restart their careers as entrepreneurs and current entrepreneurs looking for new ideas to accelerate their success.

The topics ranged from new market opportunities such as eHealth and clean technology to management best practices for building successful businesses.

My panel was moderated by Bob LaLoggia, CEO of StormSource, a Scottsdale-based company which offers an assortment of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, including Appointment-Plus, MessageRover, ZipLine, and Virtual Assistant Manager.

The other panelists represented various perspectives of the cloud computing world– Kimbro Staken, CEO, JumpBox; Dave Rice, CEO, TrueCloud; Marc Chesley, VP of Development and Technology, InfusionSoft; Sam Pietrofeso, Senior VP of Product Development, GoDaddy; and Dave Wallace, Director of Product Management, CRM Solutions, Sage Software.

If you’re keeping score, the panelists offered the following points of view respectively–open source applications; channel opportunities; sales & marketing automation SaaS apps; hosting services; and legacy vendor moving to a SaaS model.

But, what we also represented was a plethora of powerful web-based tools and resources that are increasingly available at incredibly low costs for budding entrepreneurs, as well as established companies, seeking to build their businesses quickly and more effectively.

When I started THINKstrategies in 2001, a couple of months after 9/11, I was able to find a handful of inexpensive online resources to get me started–my web hosting, website design and email marketing services were the key pieces to getting THINKstrategies started.

Creating the SaaS Showplace, as well as the Managed Services Showplace, has enabled me to see many more valuable online services emerge that are perfectly suited to helping people start and grow their businesses. In fact, there are now over 1200 companies offering thousands of SaaS alternatives across 80 different application, industry and enabling technology areas. The Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program has been highlighting the business benefits of these services since January, 2009.

The Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference panel clearly illustrated that there has never been a better time for someone to build and grow their business leveraging today’s cloud computing alternatives. Not only are there an endless array of powerful online applications and resources at their disposal, but there are also limitless opportunities to build cloud-based or cloud-oriented businesses.

However, one of the challenges remains clearly defining the meaning of the ‘cloud’ and cloud computing. This was the first question we tried to answer and continued to be a question that arose from the audience.

cloud computing Managed Services Showplace SaaS SaaS Showplace Software-as-a-Service THINKstrategies