Client work, travel and family distractions have conspired to force me to neglect my blog over the past few weeks. And, more than a week of dreary weather in the Boston area hasn’t helped my energy levels.

It is impossible to devote enough time to disect all of the Cloud-related news which has occurred since my last post, but here are a few developments which caught my eye recently and illustrated many of the themes and topics I’ve written about over the past few weeks, months and years.

• Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) recent service disruptions are the latest example of the frailties of the Cloud, coming on the heals of Google’s own outages.   These incidents also illustrate the higher stakes which traditional software vendors must face as they try to transform into service providers, as I discussed in a 2009 blogpost. However, some of Microsoft’s Office users were spared serious downtime by the company’s ‘Software Plus Services’ approach which permitted them to continue to operate offline while their BPOS were unavailable. As I suggested in 2008, this hybrid approach might be viewed with distain by many industry purists, but has obvious benefits during incidents like those which have plagued the Cloud’s leading providers recently.
• SAP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner to Deliver Enterprise Solutions in the Cloud: This new alliance announced during SAP’s Sapphire conference is the latest example of the new generation of Application Service Provider (ASP) solutions offered by ‘incumbent’ software vendors (ISVs) made possible by AWS which I discussed in an E-Commerce Times column this past March.
• SPS Commerce’s acquisitoin of Direct EDI is not only the latest example of the industry consolidation which has been widely anticipated, but it is also an example of how various Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other Cloud players are consolidating their position in the inter-enterprise solution arena, including supply-chain and e-procurement, as I predicted last October.
• BMC Software’s acquisition of Coradiant is another example of the growing attention being given to providing stronger management tools that can span on-premise and online resources as organization seek to gain greater control over the chaos created by the Cloud, as I suggested in an Internet Evolution commentary in January.

Click here to find links to my most recent writings.