Browsing the local papers during my trip to India last week, I came across a news item (based on a PR release) about Pervasive that caught my attention. Pervasive has partnered with a US-based firm (but having Indian roots & operations) to market and deliver data integration solutions in India. That's a smart move -- clients will be much more inclined to consider Pervasive solutions if there's someone local they can rely on for support. Also, India is rapidly growing market; the Indian economy grew at 7.9 percent annually last quarter -- no small accomplishment in a tough worldwide recession -- and is expected to grow at upwards of 10 percent next year.

First, the rise of SaaS as an office automation solution will be very apparent in 2010. Those using Google Docs today already understand the value that an office automation application delivered out of the cloud can provide. While Google Applications such as Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Calendar are all the rage in small- to medium-sized businesses, larger enterprises have been turning up their noses. However, in 2010, largely driven by the release of Microsoft's Office Web Apps, office automation applications coming out of the cloud will enjoy wider acceptance by Global 2000 companies looking to move to the cloud on the wings of existing players such as Microsoft.

We've actually been here before. Perhaps you remember the Network Computing movement circa 1996 that advocated removing all native applications and using network applications for all things productive. In short, it did not catch on.

L.A. mediated security risks by placing a clause in the contract that requires Google to compensate the city in the event that the Google system is breached and city data exposed or stolen. That is something that every major SaaS contract should include, if you ask me. Also, this is not the free Gmail everyone knows. This is an enterprise version of their cloud-delivered software that comes without the ads, and with technical support.

But here's a question for you the enterprise customer: is all this enthusiasm always in your best interest? Are we just seeing a repeat of all the early hype around MOSS 2007? Let's dig a bit deeper.

To back up the cryptic Exadata 2 claims issued last month, Oracle offered a wave of press releases and presentations. First up, Oracle and Sun aired the results of a TPC-C benchmark showing Exadata 2 to have achieved the fastest scores yet on that lab-based test. Next, details were shared on the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array, the turbo charger inside Exadata 2. A long list of Exadata customers was shared, several of whom reportedly presented during the event. Finally, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took the stage late yesterday to reiterate Exadata 2 top-speed and low-cost claims (he also introduced next-generation tech support, as explained here). Then he threw down the gauntlet to IBM, saying, "if you can find an application running on an IBM computer that we can't run at least twice as fast on a Sun/Oracle machine, we'll give you $10 million.

Not too long ago, I wrote about a Federal IT spending dashboard created by the US Government that represented an unprecedented attempt at bringing transparency to federal IT spending, simultaneous demonstrating a federal desire of using modern technologies for a greater and common good.

Not content with this remarkable initiative, the US Government seems to have taken on another solid challenge: leading the charge for deeper and wider adoption of cloud computing across government agencies. Make no mistake: this is an extraordinarily ambitious initiative, but one whose benefits should (with some luck) eventually widely surpass the challenges.

We talked a bit about the institutional conflicts of interests when analyst firms consult for both buyers and vendors -- a primary frustration that drove him out of his analyst firm as well as me to found CMS Watch. (It's topic Alan has already plumbed here.)

We also discussed a related issue that strikes me as potentially more insidious for buyers. My colleague pointed out that software vendors typically don't spend money with analyst firms to bribe them outright. Rather, they purchase attention through which they can try to get an analyst to define the marketplace and customer challenges according to that particular vendor's approach.

Every Twitter user gets the same on-site visibility and capabilities. As a result, celebrities excluded, authority chez Twitter derives from your network and from your tweets and only after that from your extra-Twitter identity (a.k.a. your biography and employment). Since open publishing is an independent-analyst ethos, we independents have taken to wide-open Twitter like, well, whales to the air.
It's the big-firm analysts, habituated to rarefied, invitation-only venues, their identities subjugated to their firms', who have generally been slower to get into the game: Twitter and even basic blogging. The net effect is a big boost in stature for independent analysis. Writing as one myself, that's a good thing!

Every time Twitter goes out, or, in this case, a major free email system goes down, everyone uses the outage as an opportunity to cast shadows on cloud computing. I'm not sure why. In many cases its apples versus oranges, such as Twitter versus Amazon EC2. Also, systems go down, cloud and enterprise, so let's get over that as well.

I don't want to suggest that there aren't viable competitors to SharePoint. Far from it. There are a number of very good tools that have similar functionality. However, as a consumer you need to do your homework and ensure that you're choosing the tool for the right reason: it meets your business requirements. This is true whether it's SharePoint or Alfresco (which has also been positioned as a "SharePoint killer").

The McKinsey findings appear, at first glance, very optimistic for offshore outsourcing in general and India in particular. Out of a total of $80 billion worldwide revenues for providers of offshore services in business and technology, India leads by a wide margin, garnering $58 billion -- a market share of over 70%. The future looks good too -- McKinsey estimates that the global "offshoring" market could grow to about $500 billion by 2020.

So, what are they doing wrong? The key issues include:

• Following the hype.
  
• Picking the wrong battles.
  
• Not considering the business.
  
• Being a bit too chummy with providers.

The definition of "open source" (as applied to software) is almost universally accepted as that of the Open Source Initiative. Per the OSI, "open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with [certain] criteria" that are outlined on the OSI's Web site. Open-source software, per the OSI, is free, "free" as in "free beer" rather than necessarily as in "free speech," which latter usage of "free" carries with it certain responsibilities. Those responsibilities are "vitally important" according to Richard Stallman and other free-software movement proponents.

So, will cloud computing kill the data center?

Probably not. While cloud computing is a great fit for some applications, and/or other architectural components, it typically won't be a fit for all applications and/or architectural components. There will always be some data, services, processes, and complete applications that you want to keep within your firewall for a number of reasons, including: Compliance, privacy, fear, control, and cost.

From Wikipedia:

That's a lot of work just to say that you have your own space, at least logically, but physically you share and share alike.