Birst is a multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider of data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and analytics for both public and private cloud deployments. Today we published this On the Radar briefing note that follows a simple “ten questions” format, which we designed to provide a concise but thorough overview of a company and its products and services. We use this format to focus on the capability and suitability of specialist vendors – to help you build the best possible vendor shortlists when looking to make new technology investments.

This report is available for immediate download by paying advisory service subscribers, or can be purchased separately (see the report’s library page for more information).

You can find the report here in our library, along with key messages and a full table of contents.

Are you thinking of moving your email to the cloud? Or perhaps you have already made the switch?

Whatever your position on cloud email – positive, negative or just interested – we’d like to invite you to take part in our Email in the Cloud web survey. The survey aims to find out organisations’ priorities and concerns with regards to this increasingly high profile trend, and to test the theory that collaboration is becoming one of the main drivers of SaaS usage within organisations.

Once the survey is complete, we’ll create an in-depth report drilling into the survey findings and correlating them with findings from our other Cloud Email research work. Everyone taking part in this survey will be eligible to receive a free copy of the report – just leave your email address at the end of the survey.

So please let us know your thoughts, we’d love to get your input! To participate, just click here – the survey should only take a few minutes to complete, and your responses will remain completely anonymous.

Thanks!

Yesterday saw the long-anticipated launch of Microsoft Office 365, the company’s first true software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, and the replacement for its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The product, which has been in public beta since April (and in private beta since November), includes SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online and Office Web Apps, as well as a licensing option for the Office desktop tools, and is the company’s main challenge to Google Apps.

While the offering comes with licensing plans for businesses of all sizes, it is small businesses that Microsoft is targeting most pointedly with its launch-day marketing push. It’s easy to see why Office 365 might be of interest to a small business, giving them enterprise server tools that would have been unaccessible previously due to the IT skills and investment needed, while enabling them to leverage the desktop tools that they are already familiar with. Of course it also brings all the general benefits of SaaS services such as low-cost, flexible licensing, and anywhere access. However, it will be interesting to see whether Microsoft is able to get the attention of the broader small business community sufficiently to make them consider Office 365 as a potential benefit – IT is tyically a long way down the list of priorities for SMBs, in any form. Partnerships with organisations who are already working with small businesses, such as Vodafone and Telefonica which were also announced yesterday, will help with this, and this is clearly a key aspect of Microsoft’s strategy in its push with Office 365.

An interesting point which surfaced yesterday was the different perspective on data security at this end of the market; UK launch customer Shine Therapy explained how Office 365 introduced security in their business where there was none before – because previously their data storage was largely paper-based. This was an obvious contrast with the way larger organisations view SaaS, and the concerns relating to the risk of online storage in the cloud versus storage in on-premise systems.

When it comes to competing with Google Apps, Office 365‘s main advantages are two-fold, with both involving the Office suite. Firstly, as I already mentioned, the fact that Office 365 builds upon those familiar Office tools, meaning that there is no significant learning curve relating to the user experience. And secondly, its support for offline activity, again though desktop applications such as Outlook, Word, and SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove). While the cloud offers great benefits, until we have fully reliable broadband services, offline access remains a major requirement, and Microsoft will no doubt win many battles against Google Apps and other cloud services on this argument alone.

Despite this, one of the most significant points about Office 365 is that it has the potential to offer Microsoft a solution to its financial dependence on its Office domination on the desktop. It needed a way to transition smoothly to a less client-heavy solution, and Office 365 could potentially provide this, through Office Web Apps and its access-anywhere approach. But that is very much a long-term view, and Microsoft is only at the beginning of that journey.

For more analysis of collaboration news, trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

Last week I made my annual 24-hour flying visit to the US east coast and the Progress Software analyst day. Last year CEO Rick Reidy laid out plans to create a $1billion company by bringing together a number of its brands (particularly Savvion, Actional, Apama) together under the concept of ‘Operational Responsiveness’ through ‘Responsive Process Management’ (RPM).

Unsurprisingly, the 2011 event was principally a continuation of the 2010 day – as last year, this year was pretty much all about RPM and Progress’ efforts so far in developing its technology and marketing. The meat of the event saw Reidy, backed up by CTO John Bates and John Goodson, Rob Levy’s replacement as SVP Products, announcing and (fleetingly) demonstrating Progress RPM Suite 2.0  and Control Tower 2.0.

The second release of the RPM Suite deepens the integration between Actional (transaction management and event adapters), Apama (event processing) and Savvion (BPMS) technologies, but most importantly brings Control Tower 2.0 into the picture.

Control Tower 2.0 adds a number of significant capabilities – particularly:

• Progress Visual Analytics – embedded analytics tools to help administrators drill down from high-level dashboards to underlying models, KPIs, and process instance data
• The ability to launch corrective actions on-the-fly in the Savvion platform from within Control Tower, in response to alerts regarding process problems
• Collaborative web-based process modelling from within Control Tower (this is something Savvion’s been working on for a while).

My concern at the previous year’s event was that Progress was in danger of painting itself into a corner: by highlighting RPM as the “next step beyond BPM”, it was in danger of creating for itself a very specialised niche. It seems that the company understands this challenge, and is doing some things to try and avoid this particular trap. We heard about three specific initiatives, all of which are related.

Firstly, it’s creating a set of vertical industry ‘solution accelerators’ – building on the Savvion strategy pre-acquisition – aimed at tapping directly into buying needs of line-of-business executives in target industries. These are being driven by dedicated Progress VPs in six key sectors: capital markets, banking, insurance, travel, supply chain, and comms/media. Solution accelerators target particular industry issues (for example in comms/media the three currently-available accelerators target order management, integrated trouble management and order visibility and assurance).

Solution accelerators comprise two layers atop the Progress RPM Suite. The lower layer is a set of solution-specific ‘foundation components’ (protocol and application adapters and so on) that are sold and supported by Progress as products; customers will receive fixes and updates to these through maintenance contracts. The upper layer is a set of solution-specific templates and assets that are provided ‘as is’ and not supported or maintained by Progress.

Secondly, and building on its strategy of developing solution accelerators for particular industry pain points, Progress is now pitching its RPM technology set as an enabler for software solutions to problems that sit between traditional packaged apps and traditional custom software development.

Thirdly, it’s delivering a SaaS platform for its large existing OpenEdge partner base to help them use Progress RPM technologies, together with their OpenEdge investments, to deliver new offerings for customers. The platform is called Arcade, and it combines a technical platform (hosted versions of Progress technologies on Amazon and Rackspace) with business development platform (services to help Progress partners demonstrate promote their applications, deliver joint go-to-market programmes around joint offerings with Progress, and so on). Arcade is currently in beta and is due to become generally available soon.

The company is putting a lot of effort into becoming more business- and industry- focused but there’s more to do. For one thing, investment in industry solution accelerators isn’t unique to Progress: IBM, for one, is putting a lot of investment in this area; Pegasystems is also renowned for having a strong focus on its solution frameworks (Pega spends 50% of its R&D developing its frameworks; Progress’ investment in this area is likely very much smaller, based on remarks by Reidy on the day).

Having said all that, the steps outlined by Progress are mostly pointing in the right direction. There are exceptions, though: for example, the strangely-named “Business Process Transformation Live” methodology briefly outlined at the event is really nothing of the sort, and definitely fails the test of making sense in an industry exec buyer context.

A few weeks ago I was given a hush-hush pre-briefing on a new product offering from Active Endpoints called Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com. It takes the BPM and SOA technology provider into new territory, but I think it’s a sensible move – and one that prefigures a broader trend I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of within the BPM technology space over the coming year or so. I’m a little late to the party regarding the launch of the product, but hopefully I’ll be able to add a slightly different take on things.

First, let’s look a little at Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com.
Cloud Extend for Salesforce is based heavily on Active Endpoints’ Socrates product, which was announced in early March. Socrates provides a quick, simple model-driven design and development environment for creating ‘screenflows’: networks of linked user forms and guides that assist people (such as customer service reps) carry out multi-step tasks and interactions. Socrates makes use of Active Endpoints’ core design tools and engine, but specialises them for design and deployment of user interaction models.
Cloud Extend for Salesforce then embeds Socrates screenflows and the Socrates design tools within Salesforce application UIs. You can easily link individual actions specified within screenflows to Salesforce API calls, too – making Cloud Extend ‘what it says on the tin’ – a way to fairly seamlessly extend the functionality of Salesforce.com applications, particularly in the context of guided user interactions and workflows.

Of course, Salesforce.com does already offer a visual workflow and user guidance capability called Visual Workflow (based on technology acquired when it bought call centre tools vendor Informavores in 2009) – but right now, one of Cloud Extend’s key differentiators is that the tools, as well as the runtime engine, are integrated right into the Salesforce.com cloud-based user experience. There’s no obvious separation between design time and runtime, so there’s an attractive immediacy to what you put together. At the moment, Visual Workflow relies on an offline Windows-based modelling tool. Another thing that marks Cloud Extend out is that it’s more focused – rather than being pitched as a general-purpose workflow layer for Salesforce.com, it’s very deliberately designed to address a particular set of challenges to do with guiding people as they carry out multi-step interactions and tasks using Salesforce.com.

Now it’s tempting to think of Cloud Extend for Salesforce as a part of the clutch of cloud-based workflow offerings that are now appearing which aim to help customers orchestrate functionality and tasks across multiple SaaS applications (examples include RunMyProcess) but in reality it’s part of a different trend: the closer interweaving of packaged application functionality with model-driven workflow and process management functionality. As the market for BPM technology matures we’re seeing more and more BPM technology vendors look for ways to deliver their technologies as value-added components to application vendors; and we’re also seeing application vendors look for ways to offer (sometimes constrained) BPM capabilities as embedded features within their own offerings. Salesforce.com’s business model and technology delivery platform mean Cloud Extend comes at this from a particular angle, but it’s important to not get too distracted by the ‘cloudiness’ of the offering.

In the background Cloud Extend for Salesforce is delivered from a multi-tenanted installation of the ActiveVOS technology, hosted by Active Endpoints rather than on the Force.com platform. Although there’s single sign-on between the core Salesforce applications and Cloud Extend which greatly simplifies usage from a customer perspective, things might not be so clear-cut from a data hosting and compliance perspective. Salesforce.com delivers its applications from multiple datacentres around the globe to help its customers deal with data ownership and compliance issues, but as far as I know the Cloud Extend technology is only hosted in the US right now. Cloud Extend for Salesforce is offered on a per-user subscription basis, at 25% of the cost of Salesforce.com enterprise pricing.

It’s still very early days for Cloud Extend for Salesforce.com (Active Endpoints is running an Early Access Program for it right now) but I’ll be watching its development with interest.

What do you think – do you expect we’ll see more of this kind of thing in the packaged application space (whether SaaS-based or ‘traditional’)?

Since the launch of Google Apps Premium Edition (now called Google Apps for Business) in 2007, Google has been blazing a trail in the SaaS-based enterprise collaboration market focusing on making small, regular software updates, in place of the more traditional 12 month+ release cycles which we are used to with on-premise software. This has been a major differentiator for Google, and has won the company increasing numbers of business customers who find this incremental approach to new capabilities as much more manageable (both for users and for IT) than big bang updates. However, for many large organisations, this approach is simply too “realtime”, and doesn’t give them the opportunity they need to manage and prepare for the introduction of such new features, particularly when they are released on a weekly basis. So in order to address this problem, Google today announced the introduction of a new release process for such customers, which creates a short buffer between the release of the new features and their availability as part of the customer’s Google Apps deployment. In addition to the existing Rapid Release track, Google is introducing the Scheduled Release track, which will aggregate each week’s updates into a single release and provide a week’s notification to administrators in advance of those features becoming available on their domain. Initially you will only be able to choose a single release track option for each domain, although as some customers use a separate “test” domain they will be able to choose the Rapid Release for the test domain, and the Scheduled release track for the production domain, allowing testing of the new features prior to the full release. What this announcement indicates is a growing level of maturity in Google Enterprise’s enterprise  strategy, as the company gains sufficient exposure within large organisations to recognise the importance of such requirements within the large enterprise environment. The company has been careful to balance the need for some predictability for IT organisations with the need to maintain the differentiation it enjoys through its existing rapid release process, and I would expect other SaaS vendors to now consider a similar approach, particularly those targeting larger organisations.

Also today, Google has announced a new discussions feature for Google Docs. Taking the existing comments capability to a new level, the new feature enables realtime discussion directly in the context of a document, while leveraging all the existing capabilities of Google Docs, such as realtime editing of the document, and visibility of who is online and viewing the document right now. While the first release does not extend to fully threaded comments (comments are displayed sequentially under a discussion heading, with no indenting for sub-comments), it does include some interesting features, such as the ability to mark discussions as “resolved”, the ability to subscribe to discussions and and then submit comments back to the discussion via email, and Twitter-like @mentions where people are notified (again via email) when a comment is directed at them.  There is clearly a great deal of scope for improving this feature, but – I think wisely – Google has taken the approach of starting simple, and allowing customers to use and get to know the tool before complicating it with a range of sophisticated enhancements. I also think this is a significant development for Google Docs – while there have been continuous enhancements since it first emerged in 2006 (following Google’s acquisition of Writely creators, Upstartle), none have really visibly changed the way in which the tool can be used; Discussions for Google Docs however brings a little “Google Wave flavour” into the product, progressing the online, realtime document collaboration concept.

For more analysis of collaboration news, trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

Earlier this week, as part of its autumn 2010 launch of updated ‘business agility’ offerings covering BPM, SOA, virtualisation and cloud computing topics, IBM announced the upcoming launch of a new SaaS offering for organisations pursuing business agility initiatives: Blueworks Live.

Blueworks Live isn’t IBM’s first foray into the world of SaaS tools for customers with BPM interests. It represents the coming together two existing SaaS offerings in the BPM space from IBM: BPM BlueWorks and Blueprint – the latter of which came into the IBM fold via the 2009 acquisition of BPM specialist vendor Lombardi. An integration plan to resolve the overlaps and set out a clear path for users of both Blueprint and BPM BlueWorks has been a priority work in progress for IBM ever since the acquisition of Lombardi closed.

Blueworks Live is set to launch with a price of $10 per user per month. It blends the existing capabilities of the Blueprint service with some features of BPM BlueWorks – so far so good. But there are two other features that are particularly interesting.

The first represents a significant departure for IBM: Blueworks Live is now not only a platform for process discovery and modelling – it’s a platform for process automation and execution. Specifically: lightweight, immediate execution of simple approval worklists and checklist-style sets of activities though the quick creation of ‘process apps’. Process apps created on the platform can be immediately shared with other members of an organisation.

As we’ve pointed out a number times before, even in the most mature BPM adopters, only a small minority of business processes – those which are highly structured and repeatable – have been deeply studied, documented and (partly) automated. The vast majority of knowledge work, for example, has some degree of ‘process-ness’ – but it’s also dynamic – ad hoc even. Other work is more readily subjectable to standardisation, but too ‘simple’ to warrant tackling with a comparatively expensive suite of specialised tools. These kinds of work fall outside the scope of specialised BPM tools: if they’re supported with IT at all, the tools used are spreadsheets and email systems. This is the kind of work that IBM is hoping customers will tackle with Blueworks Live process apps.

(Similar capabilities can be found in offerings like ActionFlow and TIBCO’s FormVine: but those things are standalone simple form/workflow builders rather than being integrated into broader collaborative platforms. ActionBase also has some similarities, but its foundation is specifically designed around email usage.)

The second is an extension of a capability already present in Blueprint, which aims to enrich the scope and depth of social team collaboration and knowledge sharing possible around BPM projects by extending the Blueprint concept of ‘activity streams’. With Blueworks Live, this feature has been extended in two ways:

• Follow processes and work. With the addition of the ability to create process apps (see above), any team member can now follow changes to process apps and progress of activities within process instances – as well as being able to follow changes to blueprints, documents and so on. This is interesting because it means IBM isn’t just tackling the ‘long tail’ of business processes; it’s doing so using social computing and collaboration concepts.
• Availability of public streams. Even though the centre of gravity of Blueworks Live’s community features is around social collaboration within company-internal teams, Blueworks Live also presents an external activity stream within the community environment. This activity stream is curated and filtered by IBM, and is based on relevant Twitter updates from individuals and companies that IBM believes have important BPM expertise.

This is a really interesting new release from IBM. In a couple of weeks, we’ll publish a report that goes into more depth on the service’s features and capabilities, and what it means for IBM and its customers. Watch this space.

Full disclosure: I’ve been told by IBM that my Twitter account (@neilwd) will be one of those monitored and curated for inclusion in the public stream in Blueworks Live. I’m not being paid for this and in fact I only found out recently. I’m very happy to take part – but perhaps I should try to make sure I minimise any tweets about music and cheese from now on…

Yesterday Salesforce.com’s customer, partner and media event, Cloudforce 2010, took place in London, drawing an impressive 3,000 or so attendees – all the more impressive given that the company changed the date only a week in advance in order to avoid clashing with Tuesday’s London Tube strike.

The event itself was the first since the company released its Twitter-like collaboration service, Salesforce Chatter, in June, and not surprisingly Chatter played a central role in CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote, as well as other press and analyst sessions during the day. I have already written about the capabilities and positioning of Chatter as well as the opportunities it offers to customers and partners (see my Vendor Insight report – Salesforce.com spreads its wings with Chatter), but what I found particularly interesting during the event was the way that Chatter has now wound itself around all aspects of Salesforce.com’s marketing and positioning, with customer stories all referencing their take on (and use of) Chatter.

One of Chatter’s major differentiators over other collaboration software competitors is its combining of people’s own status updates and comment threads with notifications from Salesforce.com applications and other apps hosted on the Force.com platform. And this seems to be where most of the company’s partners see the opportunity with Chatter – leveraging Chatter as an interactive notification system, enabling collaboration to take place in the context of an application activity or event.

Another effective message which is being presented is the embedding of the Chatter capabilities as part of an existing process – for example the process of escalating an opportunity risk which automatically adds managers to the Chatter group focused on that opportunity so that they are notified and can provide input. The advantage of such examples is that it helps organisations to understand how the technology can be of value in a practical sense – something which is often lacking in social software marketing propositions.

With the product only released two months ago, I had few expectations of hearing about new capabilities or the product roadmap, however today’s event was accompanied by the announcement of new mobile apps for the iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android platforms. There were also a few tasters about the next version of Chatter, which is due for release in October, and which will include some new analytics capabilities as well as more practical support for customers about how to go about supporting the roll out of the Chatter technology.

It is of course still early days for Chatter, with Salesforce’s communication placing heavy emphasis on selling the strengths of the new offering, while customers are still learning about how best to use it. But even taking that into account, it is clear that Salesforce.com sees Chatter as more than a new product – it represents a new direction for the company, and brings a whole host of opportunities going forward.

For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.

One of the themes we delve into in our free online framing a Cloud Computing strategy event is the emerging role of the Service Integrator. This is something I’ve been talking about for a while in discussions with clients but I thought I’d share it a bit more widely…

So what is a Service Integrator? Simply put, a Service Integrator relates to the SaaS/Cloud Computing world in the same way that a Systems Integrator relates to the on-premise computing world.

Right now we’re at a stage in Cloud computing development which is dominated by “early adopters”. Typically such companies are willing to go an extra mile to get the benefits of a new technology and technology model – things that many other companies would consider too complicated, risky or expensive.

Activities which fit into this category include integrating data and functionality (both between Cloud-based platforms and applications, and between Cloud-based and on-premise systems); encrypting sensitive data and securing communications; backing up and restoring data; replicating and managing resources to maximise reliability and availability; and so on and so on.

While today’s adopters of Cloud Computing may be quite happy to shoulder the technical burden of making remote resources “fit for purpose” within their enterprise, we should assume that most won’t. Particularly when you consider that a big part of the promise of Cloud Computing is that with this model, you’re delegating responsibility for managing technology. Why, if you’re so interested in a model of computing which is fundamentally tied to outsourcing – and particularly if you’re interested about using this model not just for one application but for a wide variety of purposes – would you choose to take responsibility for integration yourself?

If use of Cloud Computing is to move beyond tactical use in the early adopter community, there’s going to be a big opportunity out there for providers who can wrap multiple Cloud-based services and platforms up and deliver them as bundles of managed services.

So… duh… isn’t this the same thing as systems integration then? Well, maybe a little – but not completely. There are three distinct levels that a Service Integrator can work and add value at, which further blur the boundaries between “traditional” systems integration work and outsourcing/managed services provision work:

• Technical integration. This is primarily “traditional” systems integration project work – delivering code to create and stitch custom and off-the-shelf application services together.
• Management integration. This is managed services work that is focused on delivering seamless experiences to service consumers, to agreed levels of quality. Reliability, security, availability, break/fix, helpdesk services and disaster recovery all play here.
• Contract integration. This level of integration work is about providing “one throat to choke”. The Service Integrator takes responsibility for all back-end contracts with resource and application service providers, and becomes the single integrated billing and payment point for the end customer, also creating a single point of liability for quality of service delivered.

Now of course many established Systems Integrators already combine work of different kinds (for example development/integration and application management) to create overall offerings for clients – but here, we see increased industrialisation of some the services provided (particularly as infrastructure providers like Informatica, Pervasive, and Cast Iron get in on the SaaS act at the technical integration layer), and also more focus on the economic benefits of the Cloud Computing model (rather than on “all-in” pricing for multi-year contracts). We’re already seeing a number of service providers stepping into this space, as well as new players springing up. Examples include (though there are many more):

Capgemini – which has created a specialised Cloud Computing centre of excellence and is providing advisory and integration services for its clients.

Accenture – which has created a set of services to help clients examine potential around Cloud Computing and SaaS.

CSC – which has launched two specific new offerings: Cloud Orchestration (principally operating in our technical integration layer) and Trusted Cloud (operating in our management integration layer).

Saaspoint – a specialist Cloud Computing/SaaS consultancy centred on delivering services based around Salesforce.com application service implementation, citing over 700 clients.

Bluewolf – which focuses on integrate a variety of services (often centred around Salesforce.com’s applications) for customers interested in driving change in marketing, sales and services processes.

For me, one of the most interesting things here will be to what degree the flexible pricing and billing models that have become expected in the Cloud Computing space are offered on to customers when these intermediaries become better established in this market. Will service integrators find ways to make margin out of Cloud Computing providers’ pricing and billing arrangements (for example by pooling a set of back-end application service licenses across multiple clients, and “soaking up” some of the variable demand for capacity that way) but not passing these efficiencies onto clients, instead preferring to drive clients towards fixed-price multi-year contracts? Or will they start to adopt more granular pricing and billing practices? Indeed, will this become an area of differentiation between the established SIs and the upstarts?

I’d love to hear what you think… this is a topic we’ll be digging into more over the course of this year.

If you’d like to check out our Cloud Computing event, it’s available free and on-demand… just go here. You’ll need a free Guest Pass ID to access the content, but signing up only takes a few seconds and you also get access to an extensive library of written research.

It’s easy to dismiss Cloud Computing as just another IT industry hype bubble that will one day burst, showering everyone in a slightly stale-smelling mist. Certainly, as with all waves of technology advancement, there’s been an *awful* lot of hype about the potential and – just like any other technology advancement – Cloud Computing offers no silver bullet for anyone’s IT investment or management woes.

Nevertheless our research (including a survey of 350+ IT architects in 9/09) shows that many organisations are dipping their toes in the Cloud (if that’s not a heinous non-sequitur) and they are seeing success. What’s also interesting is that some of the most eager proponents of Cloud Computing and Cloud-based application use aren’t in those industries which are typically at the leading edge of technology adoption (financial services, telecom); they’re in industries like media, retail, utilities, pharma which are more generally thought of as conservative investors in IT. This is because Cloud Computing is not a model of technology ownership – it’s a model of service delivery and consumption.

2010 will see every major IT vendor and service provider moving to offer or enable Cloud-based infrastructure and services. You need to be prepared to reap the potential benefits while managing the potential risks – and this means having a solid awareness of how Cloud Computing concepts fit into the rest of your existing IT investment portfolio. Only then can you chart a course that makes sense for you (and which won’t be driven by the proprietary interests of one or more IT suppliers).

Here’s some questions to think about that can help you frame a strategy:

• What are the ways that Cloud Computing can deliver value, and in what kinds of scenario? How does the value of a “private Cloud” relate to the value of a “public Cloud”?
• How is Cloud Computing really related to SaaS? What does this mean for me if I’m considering using the Cloud as a strategic source of IT services? Where does SaaS make most sense?
• What are the tradeoffs that I’ll experience on choosing a Cloud Computing platform, and what will be the downstream effects?
• What’s the real story with security in a Cloud Computing environment? Is the security issue a show-stopper?

With all this in mind, yesterday we launched a two-part online event designed to help enterprises frame a Cloud Computing strategy. It’s made up of two on-demand webinars which you can view at any time – and it’s completely free of charge (you just need to register for Guest Pass access to our site first – which also gives you access to a big chunk of our research library for free, too).

The event is sponsored by Google Enterprise – and we’re very grateful for their support. Nevertheless we designed and created the content without any input from Google – it’s a completely independent piece of work.

We’d love to hear what you think of this event. We’re currently exploring a number of options regarding holding future events like this, so your feedback is crucially important to us. Once you’ve viewed the content you can provide feedback right from the event home page – or alternatively leave us a comment below!