Today’s news of the merger of Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne not only adds a major new player to the rapidly growing Cloud consulting world, but also shows that there are plenty of new business opportunities for consulting and other value-added service providers in the Cloud.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Cloud Sherpas, it is one the largest consultancies focused exclusively on helping organizations adopt Google Apps and was recently named the Google Enterprise 2011 Partner of the Year. (Disclosure: I did a webinar in 2011 on behalf of Exoprise in conjunction with Cloud Sherpas.) GlobalOne has been quietly building a multinational consulting practice focused on salesforce.com, and is a salesforce.com platinum consulting partner.

The newly merged companies will adopt the Cloud Sherpas name, and will boast nearly 300 employees in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific (APAC) region working out of … Read More »

A year ago, I published a series of 10 predictions regarding how the Cloud Computing marketplace would evolve in 2011 in E-Commerce Times. Here’s a recap and assessment of my predictions:

The Cloud Computing market will grow more rapidly than analyst firms forecast as organizations move from asking “what is Cloud and why is it important” to “where and how can I capitalize on the Cloud today.”

I think I did ok on this one, although there remain plenty of organizations who are still trying to define the Cloud and determine why they should seriously consider employing it.

This accelerated growth will occur despite a major cloud computing service disruptions and/or significant security infractions, which will heighten customer concerns but won’t discourage wider adoption.

This certainly was the case as we watched Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) crash, jeopardizing numerous start-ups and other companies dependent on its Cloud … Read More »

Salesforce.com, Dell-Boomi, Progress Software and Birst are the latest Cloud companies sponsoring and speaking at the Cloud Channel Summit, on Monday, November 7, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

These Cloud companies join a growing number of sponsors, partners and speakers participating in the one-day executive forum which will bring together senior executives from leading Cloud vendors and their channel company counterparts to share industry best practices and innovative ideas for building profitable and successful channel partnerships in the Cloud. 

Click here for more information.

In case you missed it, I published a couple of commentaries and participated in a three videos over the past two weeks discussing the industry implications of the major announcements at Salesforce.com’s annual customer/partner extravaganza, Dreamforce 2011.

Here are the two recent commentaries:

E-Commerce Times: Dreamforce Takeaway – It Is All About Cloud Channel Strategies, 09/09/11 
Datamation: Are You Ready for the Social Enterprise? 09/06/11

And, here are the recent videos,

The Pulse Network: ITEC This Week, 09/09/11 
DreamSimplicity: At Dreamforce, 09/05/11
TechTarget: Is Salesforce.com’s DRO the First Step to a Private Option? 09/01/11 

The Pulse Network also gave me an opportunity to promote our upcoming Cloud Channel Summit. Check it out here.

Stay tuned for more perspectives regarding the business implications of Salesforce.com’s latest initiatives and announcements.

Today’s official launch of Microsoft Office 365 squarely positions the company as the latest major contender seeking to win a share of the rapidly growing Cloud Computing marketplace.

Although Microsoft has been saying that it is “All In” and funding a TV ad campaign which has made the catchphrase “To the Cloud” popular, Microsoft 365 represents the company’s boldest offering to date. The company has been watching its Office suite suffer attacks from Google Apps for years. In fact, Google Apps are quickly becoming the basic productivity suite of choice for most new college graduates entering the workforce.

Many of these new entrants to the workforce are forgoing email altogether by relying more on Facebook, Twitter and text to communicate. In response to these trends, Salesforce.com is pushing its Facebook-like Chatter communications platform as a dramatic switch from traditional email.

IBM is also attacking the … Read More »

One of the most vexing challenges facing today’s IT and business decision-makers is how to integrate critical corporate data across a widening array of on-premise and on-demand systems and applications.

Many believe that the age-old data integration issues of the past have only been compounded by today’s rapidly expanding assortment of Cloud-based solutions which raise the expectation of easy end-user access from anywhere at any time.

While there are a growing number of application program interfaces (APIs), Web-based connectors and Cloud-oriented systems integrators that are reducing the difficulty of overcoming this integration issue, it still represents an important impediment that many organizations are reluctant to face.

Intuit announced a new program yesterday aimed at addressing the data integration issue. The Intuit Anywhere program promises to give software developers a new method of extracting QuickBooks data directly into their third-party applications, including web and mobile.

This new data export and integration capability … Read More »

Plenty of has been written about last week’s disruption of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) which took hundreds of organizations offline, including many rapidly growing start-ups and evolving aspects of enterprise operations.

(The best I’ve read summarizing the questions raised and lessons to be learned as a result of the AWS outage was by my friend Phil Wainewright.)

After suggesting at the beginning of last week that recent issues surrounding Google could derail the rapid growth of Cloud Computing services, it is obvious that Amazon’s problems must be added to the list of sobering events which will certainly cause many entrepreneurs and enterprise decision-makers alike to re-think their Cloud strategies and deployment tactics.

Google’s support issues, combined with Amazon’s service availability problems, clearly make real two of the three greatest fears which IT and business decision-makers face when considering the widening array of Cloud alternatives. The third primal fear … Read More »

The recent flurry of major vendor announcements regarding their new Cloud Computing initiatives, latest acquisitions and offerings clearly shows that the “Cloud Rush” is in high gear.

Here’s a quick list of the announcements which have caught my attention over the past few weeks in chronological order since HP unveiled its Cloud ‘vision’ last month, and my views regarding their significance,

Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire newScale, 03/29/11  – Cisco Systems has been pushing into the ‘new data center’ environment for a while with its Unified Computing solutions. It acquired newScale to improve its provisioning capabilities to make it a more viable Cloud vendor for enterprise customers and service provider partners.
Salesforce.com to Acquire Radian6, 03/30/11  – Now that Salesforce.com has succeeded in popularizing its Chatter social networking capabilities, it wants to give its customers the necessary tools to monitor, manage and measure the effectiveness of these … Read More »

Salesforce.com unveiled a series of important enhancements to its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service-desk management capabilities this week aimed at helping businesses more effectively track and respond to the escalating volume of data feeds from Facebook and Twitter.

The company’s Service Cloud 3.0 announcement coincided with its CloudForce 2011 event at the Javits Center in NYC, in the backyard of ‘Corporate America’, the financial services sector and the traditional media world to maximize its attention.

The new round of enhancements were primarily focused on enabling users of Salesforce.com’s service-desk management platform to better monitor Facebook and Twitter feeds, and track their response to comments, complaints and other service requests via these increasingly important social networks.

Salesforce.com made sure to brand each feature as a separate offer to ensure it gained as much attention as possible, including Salesforce.com for Facebook and Salesforce.com for Twitter.

The new monitoring capabilities are actually enabled … Read More »