Recently, a colleague attended a cloud-computing workshop and mentioned a bit of trivia. One of the experts at the event didn’t like the word ‘cloud’ and insisted on using the term “Infrastructure as a Service.” What’s in a name? Everything or nothing, depending on your point-of-view. You could argue that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but you could also argue that the right name, with the right connotations, is what takes trends past a tipping point. So let me offer you impartial thumbnail ‘name analysis’ of the common candidates, and you decide which you like.

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The easiest way to predict the future, as Alan Kay said, is to invent it. Some friends of mine, over at a stealth design/innovation startup called WilsonCoLab, decided to start a site dedicated exclusively to this task at www.cloudworker.org, which beta-launched today with a neat contest (seriously flattering to have a word you coined taken this seriously!). Cool logo, eh?

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To most the Internet represents a black box, it’s worked fairly well for all these years, and lots of companies are investing lots of dollars in delivering Internet (or cloud) based services, so it should work just fine forever, right? Not exactly. Nemertes just released a freely available update to our 2007 study on Internet infrastructure, this time looking at not only bandwidth and congestion issues, but growing challenges in maintaining basic connectivity between networks as the Internet struggles under the dual strains of rapidly growing routing tables coupled with decreasing availability of IP addresses. Our conclusion: by 2012 the reliability of the Internet begins to suffer. Companies basing their future on the web would be wise to educate themselves on what goes on inside the box.

At least, you are according to the most popular entry in a contest sponsored by Plantronics to find a term to replace the so-20th century “telecommuter.” According to a survey also conducted by the vendor, there are a lot of us cloudworkers out there–more than half of respondents said they work from home at least one day a week–and half of them say they are more productive when they do so. Also, 36% of knowledge workers say they’re traveling less, and 40% are spending more time in teleconferences (cloudconferences?).

I generally view a trend as nearing maturing when the Economist sits up and takes a notice. They now have a special on cloud computing:

As IT gets cloudier, the economics of the business will change

As you might expect from the Economist, they take a moderate view:

In essence, what [Cloud computing] does is take the idea of distributed computing a step farther. Still, it will add a couple of layers to the IT stack. One is made up of the cloud providers, such as Amazon and Google. The other is software that helps firms to turn their IT infrastructure into their own cloud, known as a “virtual operating system for data centres”.

The article is fairly well-rounded and covers expected impact on SaaS players, hardware providers and industry structure. Besides the Economist story, EC2 coming off beta and offering an SLA for its Linux cloud model, and also offering a Windows version, are signs of true critical mass.

All the more reason to vote for cloudworker as the new telecommuter! Incidentally, my neologism made the NY Times yesterday, and also featured in a piece in industry trade site SearchUnified Communications.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

Not much going on today related to Enterprise 2.0 unless you consider the cloud as a related topic.  After all, many of the Enterprise 2.0 vendors are building their applications on cloud-based infrastructure or delivering their applications via SaaS.  With Microsoft’s PDC Conference going on this week, today’s news focused on Azure, Microsoft’s planned cloud-based operating system. Here are some of the more interesting stories I found:

In this article the writer compares a recent memo from Steve Ballmer called “A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution” to 1995 memo from Bill Gates called “Internet Tidal Wave”, a wake-up call of sorts to the changes in store due to the Internet. “The Cloud” represents an equally significant turning point in computing and one one Microsoft’s Azure is targeted at:

“Ballmer’s cloud computing memo timed for election’s winner”

I also liked Art Wittman’s blog on Microsoft which looks at the cloud from a business technology standpoint. What does this mean for companies large and small looking at how they can leverage the cloud, and where does Azure fit in:

“Is The Cloud The End Of Microsoft?”

Did your company make an announcement or did I miss any significant news? Feel free to comment.

TechCrunch: Interview with Ray Ozzie on MS Cloud-based OS (Azure):
Ray Ozzie on Azure, Office unchained, and Openness

LinkedIn opens up Open Social-based platform to developers, focuses on business applications:
LinkedIn’s New Apps Are All Work and No Play | Epicenter from Wired.com

Microsoft introduces new Windows OS and mentions plans for web-based MS Office to compete against Google Docs and Zoho:
Microsoft Introduces Windows 7, Ending Vista Brand - NYTimes.com

Did your company make an announcement or did I miss any significant news? Feel free to comment.

Melanie Turek posted a piece last week, on a contest sponsored by Plantronics, inviting submission of terms to replace “telecommuter.”

Never one to pass up an opportunity to win nice goodies for a single word, I threw “cloudworker” into the hat. I hope the term is evocative enough that you get the reasoning behind it without much explanation. Anyway, the process of coming up with that term (5 minutes of private brainstorming) sparked a whole interesting train of thought, which I just captured in a post on my blog, The Cloudworker’s Creed.

Here is a picture and a little extract. Do check out the article and weigh in on the merits of my pen-portrait of the archetypal information worker of the future. I’ll be writing a fair number of follow-up posts in a series.

The cloudworker is the prototypical information worker of tomorrow. He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof. The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career. Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work and full, untethered-to-health-insurance free agency.

Go to the full article.

Venkatesh G. Rao writes a blog on business and innovation at www.ribbonfarm.com, and is a Web technology researcher at Xerox. The views expressed in this blog are his personal ones and do not represent the views of his employer.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that China is monitoring text-based communications for users of the Tom-Skype service. As the debate continues on whether or not public services are sufficient for enterprise communication and collaboration, organizations ought to keep in mind the risks of using public services, especially without any opportunity to independently validate security and privacy controls.

On the heels of acquisitions of PostPath and Jabber, Cisco yesterday unveiled its broad roadmap and strategy around enterprise collaboration.

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