Knorr argues that the cloud could never be separated from open source. “The number of open source cloud projects rose from a handful in 2005 to 470 by the end of 2010,” and their influence extends beyond these numbers. Developers also turn to open source to handle cloud challenges, such as OpenStack and Deltacloud. Ultimately, the cloud “takes the open source tradition of collaboration to the next level,” as these two work hand in hand.

• Why the Cloud Can’t be Separated From Open Source

If you don’t have enough time to scroll through Salesforce’s entire summer 2011 release notes, Douglas gives us a strong outline of the new features. The release announces changes to Jigsaw, Chatter, Force.com, and security enhancements for all of salesforce.com.

• My Favorite Salesforce.com Summer ’11 Features

According to IBM’s 2011 CIO Study, “60 percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years” in order to grow their businesses and gain a stronger competitive advantage. The cloud offers these businesses a simple way to access information in a cost efficient, readily available manner. These numbers extend outside of the US, as CIOs in Japan, South Korea, and China all view the cloud “as a top priority.” Business intelligence and analytics are among the top priorities for the majority of companies surveyed, and the cloud provides them with an easy and quick way of doing these tasks.

• 60 Percent of Organizations Ready to Embrace Cloud Computing- IBM Reports

Every now and then when I tell people I work in cloud computing they look at me like I’m crazy. Most people have at least some idea of what “the cloud” is, but there are the few out there who are still in the dark. Sourya Biswas offers multiple examples of how the cloud benefits the end user, even when they might not even realize it. For example, email services (especially Gmail) are the most popular cloud service, and most often are free, allowing users to receive information quickly and inexpensively. Moreover, Google Docs eliminates the need to purchase software such as Microsoft Office for presentations, reports, or spreadsheets. The fun does not stop here, however, many end users use Dropbox, Box.net, Flickr, and Amazon’s Cloud Player to make their lives easier, their work more mobile, and saves money- all without them realizing they are in the cloud.

• How the End Consumer Benefits From Cloud Computing

Salesforce’s growth is accelerating faster than they anticipated, producing “better-than-expected first quarter results,” which raised their outlook for the next three months and fiscal year. Salesforce is now on track for “a $2 billion revenue run rate” for fiscal 2012. Overall, subscriptions are up, customers are up, and shares are up- definitely looking to be a great year.

• Salesforce.com Growth Accelerates; Fiscal 2012 Outlook Raised

Last week Intuit and Salesforce announced that they would be teaming up together. However, details of the pairing are not clear. In this article, Howlett brings forth some of these issues, such as whether or not Quickbooks will be a tab on salesforce.com or a separate application, whether this is globally available or restricted to the US, and asks why salesforce.com has not announced this pairing, only Intuit.

IBM’s New Cloud Formation

This falls into the category of what might be referred to as “purpose-built PaaS” – IBM is introducing a platform based on an existing set of software services that to this point had been offered only in a packaged model.  We love having IBM-sized marketing dollars pumped into educating a large portion of the market in the capabilities of SaaS / PaaS, but we’re not in love with the concept of PaaS as an extension of a core service offering…a la Salesforce.com’s Force.com PaaS offering.  On the one hand, integration is built in and users will already be familiar with the functional aspects of the system, on the other hand if every major vendor starts offering PaaS to simply extend what their packaged software does, we’re going to have dozens of islands of PaaS that will hurt the concept and the market as a whole.  This article is spot-on in its assessment that Big Blue does hold an advantage in selling to an existing customer base, but at the end of the day, vendor-specific PaaS defeats the core value proposition of PaaS from the perspective of creating additional management overhead, forcing organizations to compromise on business process design because of integration and platform capability limitations, and requiring technical resources to learn yet another PaaS / SaaS skillset.  The goal with PaaS is to achieve (relative) ubiquity, not more of the same old and tired IT thinking repackaged as a hosted service.