The broad affection for the term "cloud computing" and all that sticks to that nowadays will mean broad affection too for desktop as a service. Desktone has its sights set on helping service providers ramp up DaaS offerings, but enterprises will be in this one too. Citrix, VMware and Microsoft will make sure they allow enterprises to do DaaS as well as the cloud providers.
The crux of the problem is that although Rational has omitted the term Development from its annual confab, it still speaks the language of a development tools company.
There will be tension between what the blended IT provider owns and what they client business owns. Knowing where the demarcation point is that separates the provider's intellectual property from the client's will be an area for especially careful consideration -- as early in the project as possible. IT providers and clients will need to partner more than tussle. IBM gets this and is already doing "play nice" vendor dance. There are still some steps to learn here for Oracle, Microsoft and SAP.
To encourage more ecommerce, the IBM-Ariba deal matches B2B buyers and sellers via LotusLive collaboration and social networking services, all through cloud delivery models.
Apple and Oracle may be unstoppable in their burgeoning power to dominate the collection of profits across vast and essential markets for decades.
Jazz is an innovation technology project by IBM Rational and IBM Research designed to help globally and organizationally dispersed development teams automate more of the development and deployment lifecycle. The goal is to integrate and automate among many back-end aspects of development to provide real-time information for managing projects, including those for services oriented architecture (SOA).
Building the organizational willpower to dictate and enforce the work required to seed the future payback will be a challenge.
IBM has been building a formidable information management arsenal, applying it widely within its global accounts and a new factor as a value-add to its many other software and infrastructure offerings. The meta data approach also requires hardware and storage, not to mention professional services. IBM knows getting your information act together leads to SOA (both kinds) efficiencies and advantages. And -- looking outward -- as Big Blue ramps up its Blue Cloud initiatives, content access and management across domains and organizational boundaries takes on a whole new depth and imperative.
I'd like to see a way for .NET developers to get such a Visual Studio-as-a-service (or open source Mono thing equivalent) up on Amazon EC2, to then force Microsoft Live to follow suit. Who needs tools licenses anymore then?
So like the days when Unix was the infrastructure law in the core corporate datacenter (and Windows was only hype-ware there), we may be back to a period where the major transitions have little to do with Microsoft's rate cards. Microsoft will be at an ongoing disadvantage in the commercial-OSS transitional disruption march across back-end servers as long as it has no OSS strategy (other than FUD). And that FUD strategy has just come up wanting.