“All too often, insider analyst research and commentary is costly, inaccessible or ineffective to the entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who need timely insights most. We’re changing this by making high-quality expert reports, data and commentary easy to access and highly interactive for our community in key emerging technology areas.”

I was therefore delighted when VP of Research Michael Wolf got in touch before Christmas to ask if I’d be interested in providing them with content.

My first piece, which is published today, explores some of the issues faced by Cloud service providers and users in negotiating the attitudes and laws of the different jurisdictions through which their data may pass. I would welcome any comments on the piece, and must thank Microsoft‘s Matt Deacon, Sun Microsystems‘ Michelle Dennedy, IBM‘s Harriet Pearson, Rackspace‘s Simon Abrahams, Computacenter‘s Matthew Yeager and F5 Networks‘ Lori MacVittie for taking the time to talk with me as I prepared it. Thanks, also, to Celeste LeCompte at GigaOM for editing and for Americaniszing my spellingz… Any misunderstandings, misrepresentations, typos etc, are of course my own.

I look forward to my next GigaOM assignment!

For those on this side of the Atlantic with a particular interest in the topic, London’s Powered By Cloud event (where I participated in a panel last year) is back for a second edition on 8 and 9 February. Of particular interest in this context is an addition to this year’s event; 10 February’s dedicated to a Cloud Law Summit.

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As widely expected, IBM will this week unveil a new Cloud Computing Division and a set of technological solutions intended to appeal directly to large enterprise customers currently wary of entrusting their mission-critical services to the Cloud.

Various sites carry the story this morning, including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal‘s Digits blog and TechCrunch.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Erich Clementi, the incoming head of IBM’s new Division;

“‘Since customers are looking for new economics, this might be a good moment for clouds,’ Mr. Clementi … said in an interview. He described his area of operations as ‘a new way of delivering IT as a service,’ that can be cheaper and simpler than adding capacity in a data center.”

Building upon existing trust relationships with customers for their Tivoli line, IBM will offer an ‘overflow cloud’ that allows customers to automatically push demanding jobs from their own data centres to IBM’s.

Along with a ‘resiliency service’ that makes it easier for customers to lodge backups of mission critical local services in remote IBM data centres, these moves are clearly small steps that help IBM begin the process of gradually weaning its more traditional customers off their own infrastructure and into an ongoing relationship with IBM-managed services in the Cloud.

Although not that remarkable a set of announcements, this move by IBM will go a long way toward reassuring those large corporates that have – so far – treated the Cloud with some suspicion. IBM (and a revived offering from Sun) carry far more weight with these companies than all the best efforts of ‘upstarts’ such as Amazon, RightScale et al with their SMB-friendly image and product.

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In my recent cull of subscriptions to print media, BusinessWeek had no difficulty whatsoever in avoiding the chop. It consistently offers a useful and timely perspective on events in the world around me, and (subjectively) seems to intelligently consider the tech perspective on things more often than some of its competitors.

Last September, the BusinessWeek.com site rolled out the beta of a new service; Business Exchange. Closely linked to stories in the magazine and features on BusinessWeek.com, the Business Exchange is a fledgling social network within which members can access background material on stories, submit additional resources of their own, and comment on the content they find. Business Exchange links frequently feature prominently at the end of articles in the magazine, but I’m quite surprised at how rarely I find myself explicitly directed back into the magazine from the site. For a quick introduction, see this video of a recent presentation by BusinessWeek Executive Editor, BusinessWeek.com Editor in Chief (and active twitterer), John Byrne.

According to BusinessWeek’s Director of User Participation, Ron Cassalotti, over 1,000 topics have been approved on the site since it opened four months ago. One of those (the Semantic Web, of course) was started by me, but I also consume and contribute content across a range of other topics relevant to my business interests. Much of this activity is relatively passive, but the site also offers the ability to grow a network of like-minded fellow members, to flag items of interest, and to comment on content shared by others.

User profile and topic pages are visible to non-members, and also rank highly in Google; as Ron demonstrated by showing me how much higher my Business Exchange profile page ranks than my far older LinkedIn profile.

Topics are suggested by BusinessWeek staff and by members of the site, and I get the impression that topics tend to be approved if the topic is in-scope (for BusinessWeek readers) and actively discussed out on the open Web. Ron tells me that there is no formal taxonomy for topics, which certainly makes it more straightforward for his team to adapt to evolving member interests and the shifting nature of the News. The lack of a formal taxonomy raises issues of its own, of course. I, for example, followed both ‘Cloud Computing‘ and ‘Cloud Computing Research.’ The former was proposed by Business Exchange member Ralph Perry, and the latter by BusinessWeek Senior Writer Stephen Baker in gathering background content to inform articles in the magazine. For a while I simply cross-posted content to both, but the numbers would suggest that Stephen’s topic is ‘winning,’ and attracting the eyeballs. Presumably at some point a back-end process (or one of Ron’s team) will make a decision to simply merge the two topics?

The network – and its features – are clearly still evolving, and there’s a way to go. I do find myself on the site most days, though, exhibiting web site visiting behaviour that I thought I’d left behind years ago in favour of my RSS reader.

And today? I find that I’m the Business Exchange’s Featured User, there for all the world to see… 

Thanks to Ron and the team, and if you keep up the good work I’ll keep coming back.

My next step, of course, is to move from being Featured User on the Business Exchange to getting my work printed in BusinessWeek itself. Then my social network-sceptical mum really will be impressed!

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Event organisers are feeling the squeeze as advertising, travel and ‘training’ budgets present easy targets to Finance Directors seeking to balance their books in the current economic climate.

Amidst announcement after announcement of cancelled and radically down-sized trade shows and conferences, one bright spot in the event management space appears to be anything related to ‘The Cloud.’ There is an understandable perception that Cloud Computing will save money, so that ticks boxes back at HQ. There is also a perception that a sound understanding of the Cloud (and yes, it’s more than simply outsourcing your Data Centre to save some money) will position companies to come out of this economic downturn extremely well placed to exploit new opportunities and grow.

One of those events to cross my radar just before Christmas was Powered By Cloud, which is being held in London – just around the corner from the UK Parliament – on 2 and 3 February. According to the site, attendees will learn;

“What does [the Cloud] mean for your business model?

How fast will this happen?

How can I make money from Cloud Computing?

What technologies will be used?

What are the implications for consumers, privacy and security?

What is the future of Cloud Computing?”

Speakers on the programme look like a nice mix of solutions providers, customers and analysts, and include Amazon‘s Simone Brunozzi, Dave Armstrong from Google, Woodson Martin from Salesforce, Rightscale CEO Michael Crandell, Elastichosts CEO Richard Davies, Simon Wardley and Sam Sethi.

If you’ve got a couple of days to spare, can convince the Finance Director to agree (tell ‘em Cloud Computing saves money…), and can get to London then this looks like a pretty good investment for that diminished travel budget. It might even be worth enduring Heathrow to reach.

And, thanks to Philip Low at event organisers BroadGroup, here’s something that might even make the Finance Director smile… If you use discount code ‘SPKR‘ when you register, you can get in cheaper and save even more money. Enjoy!

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Those podcasts have tended to focus specifically on the Semantic Web, but we’re keen to broaden that scope a bit to tackle a wider set of the issues facing those seeking to run data-powered businesses out on the Web. SaaS, PaaS, Cloud Computing and the rest are clearly vital pieces in that particular jigsaw.

So watch out for a broader set of topics in those podcasts, and thanks to Duane for his time in getting things kicked off yesterday. Do have a listen, and let us know what you think…

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Tarry Singh draws my attention to National Cloud Computing Day, which comes to the UK on Friday 12 December.

The creation of UK-based KashFlow, National Cloud Computing Day

“is being organised… to encourage UK small businesses to evaluate online applications and speed up the migration from traditional word processing, spreadsheet, accounting, email and contact management systems installed on computers to their web-based counterparts.”

KashFlow managing director Duane Jackson is quoted as saying,

“Throughout the world businesses are discovering web-based software and it’s important that UK small businesses don’t get left behind.  They are already enjoying the benefits of a wide range of online services which are virtually indistinguishable – and often superior – from there [sic] installed counterparts.

The Cloud Computing Day challenge is simple – for small businesses to exclusively use online software in their day to day business on December 12th. This is a fun challenge with a serious message.  And we hope National Cloud Computing Day will help to raise awareness of a more efficient, economic and flexible way of working.”

This is in large part, of course, an attempt by KashFlow to gain free publicity for themselves and their award winning online accounting software. As they’re not attempting to disingenuously disguise their involvement, I have no problem with that, as it may well attract some attention to the wider issues around moving applications and data to the Cloud. The Financial Times, for one, has a tradition of seeing how technology might change business on the ground, and the paper is clearly looking closely at the Cloud.

I do wonder, though, if the emphasis on ‘online applications’ is misguided? Looking at my own behaviour, the biggest shift has actually been to move my data to the Cloud rather than the UI through which I choose to interact with it most of the time.

A quick skim of the applications currently running on my machine shows that every single one of them is tightly enmeshed with the Cloud, and every single one of them has (more or less) a Web-based interface that I am consciously choosing not to use whilst sat at my desk watching snow fall across East Yorkshire.

NetNewsWire, Twhirl, Mail, ecto, iCal, Adium, Skype, OmniFocus. And Firefox of course, but that’s different. All are running locally on this Mac, but all are working with data that I can access at will from my iPhone, and all (except OmniFocus?) are also available to me by various means on any net-connected computer with a half-decent browser.

There are plenty of sound business reasons to move toward Cloud-based software, SaaS and the rest. For the end user, though, the biggest challenge must surely be demonstrating the value, security and flexibility of moving data to the Cloud. Leave the decision about whether they actually read their Gmail via google.com or download it into Mail to the individual; they have reasons for their decision, and those reasons work for them.

Right, back to watching the snow. I look forward to seeing whether Duane’s initiative gets any traction next Friday.

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