Cubetree launched a free collaboration suite designed to bring the capabilities of Facebook to the enterprise. But Cubetree’s offering goes a bit further that social computing by integrating more traditional collaboraton capabilities such as file sharing, as well as Web 2.0 services such as blogs and wikis into a complete SaaS-based collaboration offering. There’s a trend here, underscored by commercial products such as Telligent Community Server and IBM Lotus Connections to bring Facebook-like capabilities to the enterprise market, but where is Facebook itself in all of this?

I had a chance to speak with Niall Kennedy, who has written quite a bit about cloud computing recently, making sense of the jargon and clarifying the issues. For example, see his The Anatomy Of Cloud Computing, and Measuring Efficiency In The Cloud posts.

I am particularly obliiged to Niall for his observation that companies thinking about moving to the cloud should pick solutions that best match their non-cloud stacks, in order to minimize costs and breakage.

One of the clear trends thus far in the IT industry is that many displaced workers are looking at contract work as a means to survive in these turbulent economic times. Fortunately, Web 2.0 and hosted applications such as Google Apps, Skype, Zoho, Gizmo, ThinkFree, Yugma, and FreeConferenceCall.com enable individuals to access a full suite of communication and collaboration applications that previously would have required a significant up-front and on-going investment. So how do these types of applications jump the gap from “useful for small groups or individuals” to “useful for large enterprise.”

Continue Reading »

Microsoft’s announcement that it is migrating FolderShare to Windows Live Sync in December has touched off a great deal of confusion over Microsoft’s application strategy for cross-system and cross-platform synchronization. FolderShare has been in beta since Microsoft acquired it in 2005. It is designed to allow individuals to maintain shared folders across systems, or share folders on their computers with others, both Mac and Windows clients are supported. The migration to Live Sync provides feature and branding improvements, but maintains the same basic functionality. Live Mesh on the other hand is similar to Apple’s “MobileMe” to enable synchronization of things like bookmarks, mail, and contacts across multiple devices. At some point I’d expect them to harmonize features and brandings, but for now think of “Sync” as a file synchronization service.

Now that Microsoft has officially launched SaaS versions of Exchange and Office, they’ve begun making plans to deliver the next version of Office via SaaS as well. Microsoft’s move into the SaaS space is in some ways reactionary, as they look to fend off challenges from Zoho and Google, but it is also going to create concerns for the hundreds of companies that offer their own suites of hosted Microsoft apps.

As a recent convert to OpenOffice I’m still not sure the SaaS market for office apps is going to replace thick versions of document, presentation, and spreadsheet applications, but I do look forward to the continued ability of SaaS-based office productivity suites to enable easier document collaboration.

At the 6th annual Dreamforce conference this week in San Francisco, attendees were treated to an impressive keynote demonstration of their Winter ‘09 CRM. The 27th release in less than 10 years does not disappoint, but there was one new feature that really shone. The newly added Salesforce to Salesforce functionality specifically focuses on the importance of building partner relationships and leveraging partners to close deals faster.

The new Salesforce to Salesforce addition to their service permits two Salesforce.com using partner companies to share leads, opportunities and valuable information within their Salesforce.com databases.

George Hu, Salesforce.com’s EVP of Applications and Marketing, illustrated the value of Salesforce to Salesforce by touching on the partnership between Delta and Air France. Because the two airlines share customers, it made sense to pool their sales data. Salesforce to Salesforce provides a perfect and seamless way to achieve this common goal.

For more info on the Winter ‘09 release, take a peek here .

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.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last week over Google’s entry into the browser wars. The real impact of Chrome is that Google rather than trying to simply displace IE, Firefox and Safari, Google wants to own the interface for Web 2.0.

Continue Reading »

The Office 2.0 Conference is a fun event to attend with many interesting web-based apps to explore. Ismael Ghalimi is a very passionate conference host, who boasts 100% use of web/SaaS-based applications to run the event. Ismael has also taken a firm stand on the use of paper and signage at his conference with nary a pulp-based product in sight. I got quite a few demos while attending the conference today, but a few of them stood out for me.

Continue Reading »

Cisco has announced this morning that it is buying PostPath, a maker of a Linux-based messaging & calendaring solution that competes directly with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino. Cisco notes that they will use this acquisition to build advanced capabilities into WebEx Connect’s SaaS-based services rather than offer PostPath as an on-premises solution.

Continue Reading »