First, it doesn't matter if you understand the differences between Myspace and Facebook. Most of the people who work in your enterprises, IT or not, use some sort of social networking system, and most look at it at least once a day during work hours. While I assume you could put your foot down and declare this stuff against policy, I'm certain most employees would find that a bit too "Big Brother," and find a way to do it anyway, perhaps on their iPhones and Blackberries. So, social networking in the workplace is a fact of life you must deal with.

I have no issue with IBM driving into the world of cloud computing — I figured it would. But just think about the larger hardware and software players — such as IBM and Microsoft, who are now moving toward the cloud — and the potential conflicts that could occur. In essence, your cable TV provider is offering to show you how to move to Satellite TV.

Specifically I'm referring to this recent article, which examined the rise of cloud computing. The Economist did a much better job of explaining its rise than most of the technical publications that I read.

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has been building this for a long time, and it's late to the party. With existing Cloud Computing offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com and Amazon.com, this offering is merely more of the same.

While cost was on the top of everyone's mind, other things such as 'going green,' and fixing internal IT issues were among the motives that sent many in search of better IT on the Web. However, some people said "Not so fast," especially when they considered the recent outages that demonstrated the downsides of depending upon SEI (Somebody Else's Infrastructure).

First, what the heck was I doing for the last 6 months? Let's just say I was actively building the cloud…looking to drive the technology into some unique directions. The idea was to do something different; the cloud is getting crowded, in case you haven't noticed.

Case in point is this eWeek article about Shaklee's strategic movement into the SaaS space, finding many opportunities to save money and time over traditional approaches.

What was cool at the time was cross-platform tools, or, tools that promised that you could write an application once and run it on any number of platforms. Long story short, most of them worked equally poorly on all platforms. The fact is that you can't be excellent on all of them. Pretty sure not many of those tools are around today.

Moving forward, we have the opportunity to leverage discrete services for use within both SaaS-delivered and enterprise applications. These are typically Web services that provide a specific and narrow set of behaviors and data that are meant to become part of a larger application or composite. For instance, address-validation services, tax-rate-calculation services, stock-transaction services… you get the idea. These are not visual services, but can become core components of larger applications, and they are services you won't have to write, test, or host. Thus, you have the ability to build core applications by mixing and matching services that you rent, not create. This is the destination for the new Internet, and the next frontier for the existing SaaS players.

From this article:

"Microsoft has said that the Internet service provider Fasthosts, which has started offering a subscription-based version of Microsoft Office 2007, is infringing on the software giant's license regulations — but Fasthosts has denied this claim."

"Things aren't the way they used to be in software sales departments. Traditionally, salespeople relied on hefty commission checks after landing big deals. Now, with the widespread adoption of SaaS products, vendors are adjusting their compensation models and salespeople are seeing smaller, but more regular, commission payouts."

"Software-as-a-service is preferred by most end users over the kind of service support and maintenance provided by traditional customer relationship management (CRM) vendors, new research has concluded.

Datamonitor conducted a survey of 300 pharmaceutical and biotech firms across Europe and North America and stated that the on-demand CRM delivery provided by SaaS was more popular in the five areas of service analyzed."

The prediction by many in IT that end users would push back on SaaS is just not coming true. Indeed, the more that SaaS becomes a part of the enterprise application suite, the more the end users seem to like it.

I think this is the case for a few reasons:

We've seen these types of applications before, with the online version of Microsoft Office being the best example. In essence, someone takes an existing enterprise application, recreates it as a Web-delivered app, and in doing so, dummies it down and reduced its features. Typically, these apps are less attractive and harder to use.

The dilemma is that while IT operations wants to continue to control all applications, including SaaS, there is little they can actually do to resolve issues. Or, is that completely true? There are ways that IT operations can manage SaaS, and do so proactively.

The market is in its early high-growth phase, having passed the inflection point in the typical high-tech market scenario, West says. It's characterized by large numbers of fairly small vendors, with more entering constantly. In this case, the growth in the number of providers is being aided by some very large organizations, including Microsoft Corp. and IBM, and some small middleware vendors such as Progress Software Corp., which are helping business partners, particularly independent software vendors, move into the market.

"The virtual appliance idea targets many of the same customers as SaaS, and the article points out that some companies may prefer the virtual appliance route since it would keep data in-house. Big vendors are starting to sell software to run in a VMware environment and VMware is boasting more than 2,500 virtual appliance downloads per day. But will these appliances rival SaaS? Time will tell."

So, what the heck is a virtual appliance anyway? For that answer, I found the best description on Wikipedia: