We’ve fallen into a lengthy pattern of rainy weather in the Boston area. Even though it’s starting to feel like we’re living in Seattle rather than Beantown, I don’t mind wet Sunday’s because they allow me to catch up on work and reading, and enjoy a guilt-free afternoon staying indoors watching football (the Red Sox season being over).

If you’re looking for some interesting reading that you might have missed during the past week, here are a few good articles:

1. The French Get Lost in the Clouds Over a New Term in the Internet Age. This 10/14/09 Wall Street Journal article discusses the humorous way in which the French government is attempting to rename “cloud computing” because of its double-entendre meanings in the French language. It not only highlights the language barriers to promoting an idea internationally, it also speaks to the fundamental ambiguities of the cloud computing term which has slowed its adoption in many quarters.
2. To Do More With Less, Governments Go Digital. While the French government is trying to decide on the right term for cloud computing, this 10/11/09 NY Times article discusses some of the government initiatives in the U.S. aimed at  improving the quality and reducing the cost of services which were showcased during a two-day conference in New York City called, “Smarter Cities”. This event spotlighted a growing array of public-sector oriented projects which also includes the federal government’s new ‘appstore’, www.apps.gov, and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Laboratories $32 million project exploring the use of cloud services for scientific computing.
3. Looking at Life as One Big Subscription. This 10/11/09 NY Times article points out how consumers and corporations are increasingly migrating to subscription-oriented services rather than acquiring traditional packaged products. This movement is drving the growth of everything from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing to Netflix and Zipcars. It is the business implications of this migration process in the technology industry which has been the primary focus of THINKstrategies’ consulting services since its inception in 2001.
4. Forecast for Microsoft: Partly Cloudy. Today’s NY Times includes a profile of Microsoft’s efforts to reinvent itself to remain relevant in today’s cloud computing environment. The company’s challenges echo those of every other established independent software vendor (ISV) which must rearchitect its applications, redesign their go-to-market strategies, restructure its revenue recognition models, and reorient their corporate cultures to be services-driven rather than product-centric. Microsoft is facing the most serious of these challenges and struggling to find the right formula for future success. However, I think they have a good chance of surviving this challenge and capitalizing on the ‘shifting clouds’.
5. Will Cloud Computing Obsolete SaaS? This San Francisco Chronicle column includes an interview with Larry Augustin, the CEO of SugarCRM, who suggests that SaaS companies must evolve their operations to better leverage the cloud in order to survive long-term. This point of view gets to the heart of the debate about the line of demarcation between SaaS and cloud computing. Are they the same or different? I’ve always had the view that the success of SaaS has been the primary catalyst for the emergence of a broader array of cloud computing capabilities. If there is a distinction, then it is that SaaS has evolved into an rapidly maturing set of ‘packaged’ applications sold and delivered via the web, while cloud computing is a wider set of web-based development tools and delivery resources available on a pay-as-you-go basis that enable users to build their own solutions.

cloud computing SaaS Software-as-a-Service