KPMG came out with a recent study on where cloud computing is heading, and what is compelling this change. Out of the 806 executive participants, 81% said that their organization has already moved at least one business activity to the cloud, and 10% said their organization is already running their “entire core IT services on the cloud.” Why are these companies moving to the cloud? 80% reported process improvement as their main reason; 79% of users stated technical benefits, and 76% said cloud computing has strategic benefits, such as “transforming their business models to gain a competitive advantage.”

• How Companies Are Adopting and Adapting to Cloud Computing: KPMG

Cloud computing has a lot to offer for various businesses, and might also be considered crucial for startups. Most importantly, cloud computing reduces your startup costs significantly, can get you going right away with out of the box mobility, and allows for pay as you go resources and customizable plans. Cloud computing can also offer faster time to value, which means the quicker a startup can begin to look towards profitability. Other benefits they list are easier collaboration and partnering, faster access to IT enhancements, fewer IT people, and improved security.

• Cloud Society: Ten Reasons Why Cloud is Good for Startups

It looks like the Australian market is most adverse to cloud computing, and are “skeptical about the speed at which cloud computing [is] being adopted elsewhere across the globe.” However, despite their skepticism, Australian businesses are quite possibly the best-positioned market to adopt to the cloud, with 67% of their businesses already utilizing some form of cloud technology. From what it sounds like, their main, possibly only, issue with the cloud is security, which is something covered a lot in our blog and various other cloud computing blogs. The cloud is not any less secure than say, hosting your data on an in-house computer. Why so much hesitance? We’re not quite sure, but for their sake, we hope they catch on soon.

• Australian Market Most Adverse to Cloud?

In case you missed it, Force.com held a Siteforce webinar earlier this week. It is now available for viewing. Check it out to learn more about how to create and run a web site on Siteforce!

• Siteforce Webinar Now Showing

Major companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, and IBM are integrating their CRM with the social cloud. According to SugarCRM’s CTO, CRM is yet to become established. He states, “I can guarantee it will take off massively in the next few years… We have a whole new generation of social collaboration users- who we call the Facebook generation- that expect these tools to be in front of them.”
I agree with this article’s argument that businesses need to turn social, especially at the brink of the “Facebook generation” coming into the workforce; however, I do not agree when it states that Salesforce is “1st generation SaaS” and that SugarCRM and Oracle are “2nd generation, 100% open” SaaS. Marc Benioff’s whole keynote at Dreamforce was dedicated to the social cloud, (remember, “We were born cloud, and we’ve been reborn social” comment that had people tweeting #DF11 away?). Especially with the ease and effectiveness of Chatter, Salesforce seems to have the social cloud concept figured out pretty well. What do you think?

• Social CRM: The Facebook Generation Demands it

Jim Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, announced today that the United States Intelligence Community will now use cloud computing to meet budget reduction cuts. “The biggest portion of those cuts, spread across 20 years, will come from anything labeled information technology… cloud computing makes possible much of those savings.” The Director of National Security Agency followed this announcement and stated that NSA operations will be moving to the cloud by the end of this year as well. Cloud computing will provide 30 to 40 percent savings in the NSA’s IT budget, and in some respects, enables better security. Quite a big step for the advancement of cloud computing.

• It’s Official! US Intelligence Community is Moving to the Cloud

Out of 500 of the largest US companies, salesforce.com ranked in the top 12% in Newsweek’s US Green Rankings. Salesforce.com’s “multi-tenant architecture makes it possible… to have a smaller impact on the environment. More applications running on fewer servers results in lower levels of carbon emissions.” Salesforce.com was placed at number 14 with an overall raking of 91 out of 100.

• Salesforce.com in Top 12% in Newsweek’s US Green Rankings

During Tim O’Reilly’s interview with Marc Benioff, Benioff discussed how important it is for enterprises to embrace social. Customers are all over social networks, and companies need to be interacting with them and following what their customers are saying. If they do not become social, they are going to fall behind. Benioff states, “I really think that Facebook is becoming a vision of what the consumer operating system is,” and hopes that he can one day “be doing as many amazing things as Facebook is.”

• Salesforce CEO: Facebook is Leading the Direction for Where ‘We’re Going as an Industry’

To piggyback off of the previous article, salesforce.com’s Winter ’12 release embraces the Social Enterprise. With the Sales Cloud, you can “sell socially” with the use of Customer Groups, Social Contacts, and Mobile Dashboards. With Chatter, you can build your employee social network through Chatter Connect and Customer Groups. With Data.com (Jigsaw), you have access to 200+ million company records. These three are just the beginning; there is a lot more you can do with Winter ’12, click the link to read about all of the new features.

• Winter ’12 is Here and it’s Social

SMEs now have the opportunity to access enterprise-level services, security and products, but at a fraction of the cost. “The entire procedure is quick to set up and easy to use,” just log in, customize the application, and begin. It is also accessible by anyone and any department in the company at any time, so you don’t have to worry about passing software discs along to different departments. A lot of SMEs worry about security issues, but it’s actually very simple to manage security since all data and applications are centralized in a data center, so no data is stored on the actual device. Cloud computing offers flexibility, scalability, and simplicity, and it’s easier now to get a company going than ever before.

• What SMEs Should Acknowledge about Cloud Computing

The Most Important Feature of Salesforce Winter ’12
@TehNerd
Salesforce will be generally available during major release upgrades, cutting downtime significantly.

The Cloud Must go On: Watch the Keynote and Q&A
@jennydburnham
Watch Marc Benioff’s cancelled keynote and following Q&A session.

Winter ’12 Preview Webinar Recording Now Available
@cloudysan
A recording of Bhanot and Carroll’s Winter 12 preview is now available for viewing.

Using the Database.com Java SDK
@cloudysan
Bhanot discusses the Beta release of the Database.com Java SDK.

SMS Notifications for Salesforce Outages
@amber9904
Using ifttt.com to notify you of a Salesforce outage.

After Cancelled Keynote, Benioff Strikes Back; Talks Future of the Cloud (From a Restaurant)
@techcrunch
So many articles written on the Benioff/Ellison incident; here’s TechCrunch’s take on the whole ordeal.

Benioff Plays Keynote Martyr, Markets Salesforce Wares
@ZDNetRachel
Benioff speaks his mind regarding Oracle and his cancelled keynote.

On Wednesday, Marc Benioff was scheduled to keynote Oracle’s OpenWorld conference. Unfortunately, Oracle abruptly cancelled Benioff’s keynote due to a comment Benioff left on Twitter, criticizing that Oracle was not responding to the needs of corporate IT customers. Benioff decided to go ahead with his speech, but gave it at a restaurant nearby instead. Dan Gallagher gives his opinion that the incident is “manufactured drama,” and was used to draw more attention to Benioff’s speech and the subject of Chatter. What are your thoughts on the incident? Leave us comments below.

• Salesforce CEO Says Oracle “Not in Touch”

If you want to see Benioff’s keynote and press conference, click the link below. In the future, Salesforce live stream can be found at salesforce.com/live

• The Cloud Must Go On: Watch the Keynote and Q&A

An interesting juxtaposition to the previous article; Larry Ellison unveiled an assortment of cloud computing services yesterday, which will run the company’s Fusion Applications, aka “Oracle Public Cloud.”"Oracle’s new public cloud will be available for a monthly subscription and will include resource management and isolation, security, data exchange and integration, self-service sign up, elastic capacity on-demand, virus scanning, and more.” Oracle’s public cloud is now interoperable with other clouds such as Amazon cloud, but not Salesforce. In addition to their public cloud, Oracle also announced “Oracle Social Network,” which is in direct competition with Chatter. We have a feeling this is not the last time we are going to hear about Salesforce and Oracle in the same article; as TechCrunch states, “The fight is on… let the eye-rolling begin!”

• Ellison Reveals Oracle’s Public Cloud; Calls Salesforce The ‘Roach Motel’ of Cloud Services

IDC predicts that spending on IT cloud services will increase significantly by 2015, resulting in one in every seven dollars spent on packaged software, servers and storage will be related to the cloud. With such a high increase in cloud spending, strong performance monitoring is crucial. Monitoring cloud performance for users and cloud performance for development are both important, and would allow companies to solve any cloud related problems before they become an issue.

• Thoughts on Cloud Performance Monitoring

There are hundreds of articles out there about Steve Job’s death this week. This particular article, however, caught my eye. Tim Carmody’s son is 4 years old, but due to autism he has problems communicating and comes off as an 18 month to 2 year old in normal conversation. Because of the iPad, his son can better speak and communicate, and continues to learn and improve through a variety of apps. These technologies that Steve Jobs helped create and make accessible are not just used for watching funny videos of cats on YouTube and capturing funny AutoCorrect moments, some people rely on them to communicate, to express themselves, to literally speak. Apple products continue to become more accessible to people with disabilities; for example, the new Siri on iPhone 4S allows the blind to text. Even though Apple does create technology that changes peoples lives, Steve Jobs still insisted that, “this stuff doesn’t change the world.” Instead, “these technologies make life easier… these things can profoundly influence life… things don’t have to change the world to be important.” Sure, you can believe him that these things don’t change the world, but the fact that they make lives easier is strong enough. We can now communicate with people we had not before, and that is something to celebrate.

• ‘Thus Stuff Doesn’t Change the World’: Disability and Steve Jobs’ Legacy

I came across Jeff Kaplan’s recent post, Welcome to Cloud 2.0, and realized that the moniker has moved beyond just Marc Benioff and salesforce.com trying to own a new term and will probably start to stick over the summer as more cloud pundits and vendors begin to use it freely.  My own thoughts:

• Was there ever a Cloud 1.0 to begin with?  I don’t even think we’ve been able to agree on a taxonomy or definition for the cloud, but I do agree with Jeff’s assertion that the initial driver of cloud services was price and cost savings.  Thankfully we’ve all become more creative in setting forth our value propositions.
• Does anything ever move beyond version 2.0 in the evolution of overarching technology terms and principles?  As much as we joke about being somewhere around “Web 8.64″ in the versioning of the concept and term, “Web 2.0″ is still the nom de guerre for the once-new way of looking at web content and media…and it’s sounding extremely dated.  Are we going to be stuck in “Cloud 2.0″ until the next seismic shift in technology, or can we work on a roadmap to get us to “Cloud 2.5″ or “Cloud 3.0?”
• Will “Cloud 1.0″ be considered a sort of purgatory for firms that haven’t made the shift even to the commodity cloud services that Jeff references?  Do you have to go through “Cloud 1.0″ to get to “Cloud 2.0,” or will there be a sort of “catch-up effect” that allows slower adopters to leapfrog the 1.0 paradigm?

Thoughts?