As the whole concept of cloud computing continues to play out, you have to wonder what the long term strategic implications of this phenomenon will be.

Clearly, there is not going to much of differentiation when it comes to IT infrastructure.. Every service in the cloud will be roughly equivalent in terms of performance and capabilities. The only question will be not what IT capabilities an organization has access to, but rather how they will use them.

That realization is starting to take hold in certain quarters of the venture capital community. Realizing that data, and more importantly how you organize that data, is ultimately gong to decide what companies win in the age of cloud computing, venture capital firms such as Starvest are starting to alter their investment strategies.

Starvest, one of the original investors in NetSuite, recently moved to acquire Iron Solutions Inc., a relatively sleepy information service provider on all things related to farm equipment. The method behind the madness of this move centers on the realization that ubiquitous access to the cloud computing services is going to change the way people interact with information services capable of providing real-time updates over smart phones and PCs.

We have all heard the term content is king. But the king's biggest problem has been finding an efficient way to distribute its proclamations. Prior to the rise of cloud computing, content providers have been pretty much restricted to electronic mail, RSS feeds and site visitors to distribute their content.

But in the age of Web 2.0 and cloud computing, the content can much more easily follow the consumer in real time wherever they go. This will ultimately put a lot of pressure on content providers to always be current, which in turn will probably serve to weed many of them out simply because they won't be able to keep pace.

But for company's that can make this transition to a data-as-a-service model, the potential to offer lucrative custom analysis created via business intelligence tools is pretty compelling. Whether it is delivered by a third-party provider or the internal IT organization, the convergence of Web 2.0 technologies and business intelligence applications is going to change the way we think about using information.

And what that may ultimately mean is that the information side of the IT equation is about to get a whole lot more important than the technology itself.