We have frequently held up Business Intelligence as an example of how the cloud is changing the way companies do business because of the commodification of Information Technology services.  With BI being consumed “as-a-Service”, it’s no longer necessarily reserved for enterprises with large budgets.  The article below looks at the next evolution of BI consumption – mobile.

• Gartner: BI Will Be Consumed Heavily on Mobile in Two Years
  

Salesforce.com continues to explore new ways to add functionality to Salesforce CRM.  ClickTools’ investment in SurveyMonkey should “provide joint customers cloud-based survey tools integrated with Salesforce CRM.”  ClickTools is a popular app on the Salesforce AppExchange.

• SurveyMonkey Acquires a 49.9% Stake in ClickTools
  

A recent graphic by Gartner called the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure has raised some debates as a result of its placement of Amazon among the Visionaries but not among the Leaders in IaaS.  The lead analyst on the project justifies the placement by pointing out that Amazon allows customers to self-service their accounts without contracts.  The author correctly asserts that the cloud is about “commoditization through scale and through sharing of resources which leads to what we call elasticity” and not about contracts.  Scroll about halfway down the article to get into the meat of his reasoning.

• Gartner: The Cloud Is Not a Contract
  

Wikipedia turns ten this weekend.  Wikipedia stands as an important milestone in crowdsourcing and how we access and trust information over the internet.  Its success has become so ubiquitous that its name, regarded as being so odd not too long ago, has become synonymous with “information available on the internet.”

• For All Its Flaws, Wikipedia is the Way Information Works Now
  

This final article provides a great analogy for how cloud computing is the result of decades of work and innovation and yet continues to catch the occasional enterprise off-guard and unaware.

• The Ten-Year “Overnight Success” of Cloud Computing in the Enterprise

This is a great little nugget from Brian Prentice.  The message is simple: Form follows function.  Brian’s point that, “For the end user, every additional capability beyond what serves their direct purpose is superfluous ornamentation,” is spot-on; this is why we are seeing a trend towards situational applications and applications built on platforms that enable rapid delivery of functionality without the bells and whistles, such as Force.com.

Three key points:

…as a software solution evolves to meet as many as many users “requirements” as possible, it actually ends up obfuscating value to its constituents rather than increasing it.

…users are clearly seeking ways to rid themselves of this ornamentation. That message is largely lost on those responsible for creating these solutions for them.

When function follows clear purpose, form can follow function.

Thomas Bittman from Gartner cuts through some of the cloud computing hype and gives us a tempered viewpoint on mainstream cloud adoption.  Overview of the four myths:

1. Bittman takes on Nick Carr’s “Big Switch” view of rapid proliferation of cloud-based services and argues that adoption will be substantial but gradual.
2. We’ve heard many SaaS and cloud computing skeptics try to minimize cloud computing by calling it a redressing of other philosophies / technologies, but in fact it is the culmination of many concepts and technologies.
3. Bittman gives us a great line with, “We’re not going to have a handful of megaproviders, we’re going to have thousands of providers, and it will be very Darwinian.”
4. The fourth myth cuts to the heart of a common cloud computing argument – some see cloud computing as simply a large-scale commodification of traditional IT infrastructure and platform services, whereas the bigger picture view of cloud computing is that the standardization of the lower stacks of the IT architecture will enable a focus on more innovative applications of technology to build new business models and solve once daunting business challenges.