The event sessions concluded Thursday with a panel discussion moderated by Dan Golding of Tier 1 research, who also presented the day’s first keynote, and featuring John Engates of Rackspace, Anton Loeffen of YouSaaS and Matthew Taylor of ViaWest.

I’d say there’s pretty rarely an astonishing revelation during a panel discussion like this, but I do think they tend to be a good opportunity to gain some insight of the variety that doesn’t typically tend to surface in a rehearsed presentation. And Golding is a good moderator, so things stayed pretty interesting.

Probably partly because we’re in an awfully like-minded crowd here, and partly because they’re just the top-of-mind topics right now, we heard a lot about the same subjects that have come up throughout the sessions and throughout the event.

The first major subject of discussion was the economy, which has pretty unsurprisingly had an impact on all of the providers represented on the panel (and presumably, on just about everyone in attendance). The really key points made here were that while recession has perhaps slowed interest in things like colocation, it has opened up the hosting market to a lot of people who would have otherwise maybe invested in their own infrastructure. The recession is definitely making the case for moving from cap ex to op ex, which is a big hosting selling point.

Each of the panelists has seen some customers go out of business, which is really the reason the recession is going to cost companies like these. And it’s difficult to profile an at-risk customer at this point. It’s really a portion of companies across the board losing out, rather than a particular vertical.

One of the ways these companies are working to address the recession is helping to restructure customer deals, moving them maybe on to a more affordable service, rather than see them fail and disappear as a customer altogether.

The other really big point during the discussion was cloud computing. Here, again, not a ton of new information or eye-opening insight, but a general agreement that this is a for-real technology (not a fad) that is going to have an impact on the way hosts do business.

One interesting point – Golding asked Engates whether the cloud-based services Rackspace is developing (or acquiring in the case of SliceHost and JungleDisk) might cannibalize some of the market for the company’s existing services. Engates said he hoped he developed something good enough to do that, because if he doesn’t, somebody else is going to.

Taylor said he believes that, like we’ve heard before, independent of infrastructure, success in cloud computing is going to come down to service and relationships. And that is particularly true in hard economic times.