Damp, ill-defined, wispy, and ever-changing: They don't call it "the cloud" for nothing.

The cloud offers software firms lots of ways to save money, time, and headaches. But how can a savvy CEO get started? Plan a winning strategy? Pick a cloud vendor for the long haul?

For a guide to the cloud — expressly for software CEOs — we spoke to some leading players in this area. Here are their 15 considered tips to help software CEOs make sense of the cloud.

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Mindbody Software started in 2001 in what looks like a tiny niche: appointment scheduling for yoga and Pilates studios.

But related outlets like dance and martial-arts studios bring its potential market to a million businesses around the world.

Mindbody has grown to $8+ million in sales with 85 employees, and switched from selling licensed to SaaS. In 2009, it hit #370 on the Inc. 500 list and took in $5.6 million in financing.

The past eight years have been a quite a workout. Here are CEO Rick Stollmeyer's 14 tips for building a healthy business.

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Software University’s November class with guest instructor Lincoln Murphy of Sixteen Ventures was dedicated to a topic that’s been in the SoftwareCEO news since 2002. Back then, SaaS was merely a blip on our radar screens, but the experts promised that ISVs could create more enterprise value and capture the attention of a wider group of investors if they added SaaS to their repertoire.

It wasn’t until early 2006 that SaaS became a widespread topic in press releases, and by that time, Murphy already had two years of practical SaaS experience under his belt. Fast forward to 2009 and we see that the industry has matured immensely, but there are still many misconceptions that can gum up an ISV’s plans for SaaS.

The bottom line, Murphy says, is that highly-marketed “top 10” SaaS lists won’t work if you don’t really understand what SaaS is, which is why his goal during the November seminar was to clarify what SaaS is, by showing seminar attendees what it isn’t.

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