You have to trust the cloud, or it will melt away. That's Caspio's view in making a fairly over-the-top offer of a free year of service on an enterprise package guaranteeing 99.9 percent uptime and 24/7 emergency support for any customers of Intuit's Quickbase that want to switch. "Quickbase outages cost marketers and media companies money for every day they lose their leads," asserts Debra Lypen, the cloud computing company's spokesperson.

To make her point about how there's no room for error in the cloud, Lypen says Caspio hosts some 80 percent of the nation's top newspaper websites and the United States Postal Service, not to mention the state governments of California and Florida. To capitalize on its rival's outages, Caspio is even providing a 40 percent discount on custom work to help users migrate from Quickbase.

The offer comes at a time of severely strained credibility between Intel and its customers. In a late June open letter to customers from Intuit CEO Brad Smith addressing two unexpected outages, Smith said, “The disruption occurred during a routine maintenance procedure.  An accidental but severe power failure during that procedure affected our primary and backup systems, taking a number of Intuit’s websites and services offline.” That prompted the very first customer comment to accuse the company of lying to its customers because such an outage couldn’t have occurred the way Smith described it.

The frustration of both publishers and marketers with cloud services that are beyond their control is palpable when they fail. There’s already serious trust involved in uploading data or building applications on a system from which zero downtime is permissible. Paid marketing campaigns are pulling in leads that fall into a black hole, and customers can’t see what they may have paid for.

In a conversation with Lypen, who makes no apologies for capitalizing on Quickbase’s missteps, she pointed out that nearly all the Internet-based toolsets that enable drag-and-drop, no-code level knowledge to build apps are all just user interfaces for cloud computing. “It really drives it home when what you’re building is a mobile app that users expect to be always on,” she said. Caspio itself already powers more than 400,000 apps for its clients.

It’s no small commitment by Caspio to stake its own credibility on a solution. A year’s free enterprise SLA (service level agreement) is worth thousands of dollars in savings to potential defectors, but as anyone who has ever migrated from one enterprise database to another knows, it’s not a job anyone undertakes lightly.

But if “cloud computing” were to fail as a business model, the consequences would be dire for everyone in the space, including patrons, many of whom are forced by regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley to certify control over their financial data at all times. We’re thus more than mildly interested to see if this particular – dare we say it – “pissing match” will result in better service for everyone or just a lot of yellow rain.