The innovation coming out of the cloud computing market has, in many ways, made infrastructure startups interesting to venture capitalists again. Despite our excitement over the potential of cloud computing to transform IT, however, weighing on the minds of many in the VC community is what sort of time frame we should expect for exits. To put it more bluntly, we want to know when it’s going to rain — when VC investments in cloud computing will result in acquisitions or even an IPO.

The hype surrounding cloud computing is creating upward pressure for the industry to produce rainmakers.  And there are a lot of cloud startups forming — at Panorama, I see a venture funding pitch from at least 10 new startups every week, at least half of which are cloud startups working in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) spaces.

In order for a cloud computing company to make it rain, there needs to be evidence that it has the potential to take a market by storm.  After talking to a number of large incumbents that could be acquirers of cloud s