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Five copies of "Behind the Cloud" have arrived at my desk, two intended for fellow IW staffers and three for me, an embarrassment of riches. It's Marc Benioff's book on how Salesforce.com was created and built into a successful company. I am reading it avidly… but some disclosures will apparently have to wait for the sequel.

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Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, says "the cloud" is a phenomenon that is bigger than the advent of the PC. I think he's almost got it right. Cloud is bigger than the PC Revolution, but it's big in part because it incorporates and extends the PC revolution to Internet server clusters. The cloud owes more to the PC than Eric acknowledges.

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What's the first thing you should do if you're thinking of developing software for cloud computing? At ZendCon, Zend Technologies user group yesterday, three members of a five member panel answered the same way: adopt Simple Cloud API, the open source cloud services interface.

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Whether your company's data center is a couple of servers stashed in a closet or a gleaming, state-of-the-art climate-controlled facility, you're still facing the same set of challenges: how to keep the IT lights on while controlling costs, take advantage of new technologies to stay competitive, and position your company for an economic recovery in the midst of the toughest times for IT that many of us can remember.

On Wednesday, October 21, 2009, help is on the way.

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You've got a cough and a fever--and haven't had your flu shot yet. Could you possibly have H1N1? Microsoft has launched a new website to help you assess whether you've got swine flu.

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There's a bit of news coming out of Amazon today. The company is dropping the price of its existing basic Kindle (the smaller form factor one, not the larger $489 Kindle DX) from $299 to $259 and introducing a third Kindle that's the same as the basic one, but that's $279 and can roam internationally. This is a huge boon to both international travelers and people living in countries where the 3G CDMA 1x-EVDO radio technologies found in the original Kindles (basic and DX) don't work. Given the ambiguity in the...

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Back in the day, the people at Microsoft who were responsible for bringing the world Office for the Mac (the Macintosh Business Unit) fancied themselves as outcasts on the company's sprawling Redmond Campus; Outcasts with something to prove. When a new version was on the way, they'd parade into my office talking smack as though they just left the Windows version of Office lying on the canvas after a knock-out blow. They'd proceed to demonstrate how the Mac's underpinnings enabled functionality that the Windows Office guys could only dream of. So, why, after the Mac has come so far, does MS-Entourage suck so bad.

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IBM is wading into online email service, a space where Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already have big presences. Is IBM staging a kamikaze run, giving itself one more place where Lotus Notes will show it's got difficulty competing? Is there a method to this madness? Why does IBM have its head in the clouds?

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Eolas Technologies has announced a new patent infringement suit, the defendants of which reads like a Who's Who list of big tech and consumer brands. Eolas is the company that filed a patent infringement suit and ultimately prevailed over Microsoft for the latter's inclusion of plug-in capability into Internet Explorer. In today's lawsuit, Eolas says that Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Google, Sun, eBay and many others (complete list below) are infringing on a patent awarded just this month (that didn't take long!).

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If you suspect your extra-cranky baby has an ear infection on a Saturday afternoon, but his doctor isn't back in the office till Monday, a walk-in clinic--like the kind springing up in places such as retail pharmacy chains--can be a convenient place to get the ear checked. But if it's the middle of the night, what do you do?

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AccelOps' latest software release adds new features for network and data center service management, both for premises and SaaS deployments.

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Open enrollment season starts soon and unfortunately for many organizations, that'll mean informing employees that they've got higher healthcare co-pays and deductibles starting in January. But for some employers, this year's open enrollment season brings some innovative twists to their benefits offerings, thanks to the web.

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Qwaq rebrands itself as Teleplace as it continues to preach the gospel of virtual worlds for business collaboration.

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What's notable about the open source project announced yesterday, Simple API for cloud computing, are the names that are present, IBM, Microsoft and Rackspace, and the names that are not: Amazon, for one, is not a backer, and let's just stop right there.

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One could say that when it comes to IT and healthcare, President Obama is taking some of his own medicine. Obama isn't only pushing healthcare providers to adopt IT; Obama is skillfully using technology to promote his healthcare reform plans.

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With one bombshell already having been dropped at the BlackHat Conference (that most implementations of SSL are configured to give up everything including logins, credit cards, etc.), researchers dropped another one today when they demonstrated how the SMS infrastructures of GSM-flavored operators such as AT&T and T-Mobile are hackable to the point that cell phones can be hacked and their users can be tricked into divulging confidential information.

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iSEC Partners partner (and Black Hat researcher) Alex Stamos says there's really no such thing as cloud computing. According to him, it's just a trendy name to take your money. Regardless of what you want to call it though, the vulnerabilities inherent to it are very real. That was Stamos' message in a briefing he gave this morning at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. Among the highlights of my podcast interview with him; Salesforce gets a gold star and Windows-based virtual machines are architecturally more secure than Linux-based ones.

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Though it's not the bombshell that was dropped by Moxie Marlinspike, another researcher is here at BlackHat briefing attendees on how he cracked the Social Security Administration's code for creating social security numbers and how governments and organizations must respond now that SSNs are not secure in their commonly used contexts as passwords and identifiers (includes podcast interview).

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No edition of the Black Hat conference would be complete without a few security bombshells; The ones where attendees learn that a huge swath of their digital security -- previously thought to be totally secure -- is little more than a house of cards that, thanks to some Black Hat researcher, just came tumbling down. Here in Las Vegas, Moxie Marlinspike is one of those researchers and he's here demonstrating how SSL is that house of cards. Think your implementation of SSL is secure? Think again. It's time to go back to square one. (includes podcast interview)

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Today is the first day of the infamous Black Hat Briefings taking place at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas and most of what the attendees will hear today is being presented publicly for the first time by the various researchers in the building. Today, for example, is the day that many researchers reveal their discoveries and exploits but in some cases, they hold back on the tools or details needed to replicate their research until the impacted vendors and organizations have an opportunity to address the vulnerabilities. Case in point: a team of researchers used NewsWeek.com as an example of a site that's vulnerable to dynamic cross site request forgeries.

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"What I'm about to teach you could land you in jail and destroy your life and family if you choose to use it for nefarious purposes." These words and others like them have been repeated many times in the nearly 50 security classes being given during the training portion of Black Hat, now onto its fourth day in Las Vegas. The "classrooms" here at Caesar's Palace are filled with everyone from self-proclaimed hackers (their badges say so) to digital forensics specialists from the US government's most secretive agencies (their badges say nothing). There's even a male registered nurse/CISSP here (hmmmm).

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When it comes to open sourced content management platforms and their creators, there's no question about the celebrity status that WordPress and its young founder Matt Mullenweg have ascended to. If offered an opportunity to interview Mullenweg about some news, I'd undoubtedly jump on it. But when I was offered the chance to do the same with Dries Buytaert, my initial response was "Dries who?" Once I realized "Dries, the creator of Drupal," I didn't hesitate (podcast below).

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Ninety percent of companies don't put their Web applications or sites through performance tests, according to Tom Lounibos, CEO of cloud testing specialist Soasta. Which companies have taken that extra step? Soasta is introducing a certification program to sort out the testers from the non-testers.

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There are a few ways to see Microsoft's plans for a free web-based version of Office. One, it's self-competition; two, it's competition with open source software; three, it's competition with other web services. Which one matters most?

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It's finally happened. Google's dived headfirst into the desktop operating system game, just like people speculated they would. And from the sound of it, it's an OS where the main user-interface metaphor is the web. Pass the aspirin.

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After installing 64-bit Windows on one of my test machines, I scurried around to see what 64-bit desktop applications are available in the open source world. Firefox is one of them, but not officially -- at least, not yet. The reasons for this are not what you might think.

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Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, finally got a little revenge. He wasn't in the least spiteful. Rather, he was only guilty of repeating something his former boss, Larry Ellison, said about software-as-a-service and cloud computing. An audience of cloud cognoscenti at Structure 09 loved the performance.

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Firefox 3.5 went to public release-candidate status earlier this week. But while the whole 3.5 branch was still under wraps, I was sticking my neck out and running the bleeding-edge nightly builds of the browser -- and was surprised at how un-beta it was.

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As one of the head counselors of Energy Camp (Tom Raftery of Greenmonk fame is the other; blog, Twitter), I pay pretty close attention to anything colored green; green organizations, green initiatives, green events, green vendor programs, green news, etc. It was only after the last Energy Camp at Interop in Las Vegas that it dawned on me why the overall green movement gets only pockets of traction, and what we should do about it. Hopefully, someone in Obama's administration is listening.

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Love it or hate it, YouTube has become the de facto video presentation portal for, well, everyone. Now comes some worried discussion about what format YouTube may support when HTML 5 and its <video> tag make their debut.

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Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandanavian Airlines (SAS) and author of the bible on customer satisfaction (Moments of Truth) would be rolling his eyes right about now if he could have heard the telephone conversation I just had with a US Air. I've just learned that despite holding a US Air-issued Dividend Miles card (pictured below) in my hand (the one to which I've been applying my last 15+ years of US Air travel), I am a figment in US Air's imagination. Neither I nor any miles I've traveled with the air carrier exist.

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Mozilla's Prism entered public beta testing on Friday, a milestone marking the software's readiness for general use and the convergence of local computing with the cloud.

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It's the week of May 4th and if you're down at RIM's annual user conference in Orlando, you might be wondering what some Google-folk are doing there circulating amongst all those BlackBerry-lovers. Answer: They're giving enterprises yet another reason to swap Google Apps' cloud-based email, calendaring, and contact management for their on-premises installations of Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. I've been testing the new technology and have a podcast interview with Google's Raju Gulabani.

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When not organizing all the world's information and making it universally accessible, Google can often be found not doing evil, in keeping with its unofficial motto.

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Mi5 Networks, which makes a Web security appliance, will be integrated into Symantec's product line later this year.

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At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up with Apture CEO and founder Tristan Harris to "shoot" a ReviewCam movie of Apture's innovative cloud-based hyperlinking service that seems to automagically work with any content management system. What's special about Apture is how frictionlessly it adds new levels of context and depth when hyperlinking something (e.g.: text) in ways that the native CMS (egg: WordPress) could never do and it does this (a) by adding only a bit of Javascript to your templates and (b) without even having to go into your CMS's content authoring console. For end users of your content, the results are just as slick.

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I've been at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco all day "shooting" ReviewCams of sites and services that claim to fit into the Web 2.0 category. One such demo that I captured on video (see below) is essentially a search site that's designed for especially for people who are researching topics and who would prefer to have their search results organized in a way that's conducive to learning about some subject matter rather than just wading through pages of search results. Kosmix.com may be worth a try if you want to get smart about something in a hurry (instead of looking for a needle in a haystack).

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While working on the post that I just published about whether data that's stored in the cloud is really safe or not (answer: your mileage will vary), I came across a post from Michael Arrington that speculates on whether Google's forthcoming super secret announcement on April 7th is that Google's App Engine platform-as-a-service will support the Java programming language. Last week, during a cloud computing panel in NYC that I moderated (in front of an audience of Java developers), I asked Google App Engine product manager that exact question.

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Earlier this week, over on InformationWeek's sister site that's dedicated to Cloud Computing -- Plug into the Cloud -- George Crump asked a question that I thought I knew the answer to: Is data in the cloud risky? Crump points to a "recent report that the FTC is considering a request to shut down Google Apps." But after I got done laughing at such a waste of taxpayer money, I turned back to the seriousness of the question at hand.

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Probably not. But ROI is only one way to measure value. Here's an informal business case from EMC on the benefits.

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With no change to its business model or pricing (subscription-based support starting at $349 per server), Novell launched version 11 of it Linux distribution known as SUSE Enterprise Linux. For the first time, according to Novell officials, support is now available for running applications that were originally designed for Microsoft's .NET or Silverlight platforms. But, given how IT shops are starting to pinch pennies by moving to the cloud, must Novell change course?

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While at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference where Sun announced a pretty compelling entry into the cloud computing market (called the Sun Cloud, see the details and listen to the podcast), I caught up with Sun Cloud Computing CTO Lew Tucker who sat down with me to demo a GUI-based virtual datacenter deployment tool (all in a Web browser). Perhaps Sun should call it 4D; Drag, Drop, Deploy, and (voila!) Datacenter (in Sun's Cloud that is). I caught the entire thing on tape as one of our video ReviewCams (below).

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The Web is brewing with analysis of the news that IBM is in talks to buy Sun. Most of it covers the sensibility of IBM buying into Sun's existing businesses and customers. But, should IBM acquire Sun, it will also get a portfolio of cloud offerings that are being announced later today at Sun's CommunityOne East Developer Conference in New York. Given the traction that cloud computing is getting and how IBM isn't viewed as a cloud player (by a long shot), an acquisition of Sun would instantly put IBM in the game against the likes of Amazon and Google with a new offering that actually packs quite a punch.

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Although she dodged the question at the end of my podcast interview (below), Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal can't help but think that history is going to repeat itself. Following Cisco's acquisition of Crescendo Networks in the '90s (where she worked), Ullal ended up working for Cisco for 15 years. Notwithstanding its newly announced Intel-based blade servers, Cisco usually prefers to buy than build. If everything Ullal says about Arista's 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches and "the cloud's" appetite for them is true, she'll probably end up at Cisco again (by way of acquisition).

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Stealing a page from the playbook it used to launch the Liberty Alliance (and undermine Microsoft's Passport service in the process), Sun Microsystems' newly appointed cloud computing chief governance officer, Michele Dennedy, tells me in this podcast how she now has her sights set on forming a similar industry consortium for governance and privacy in the area of cloud computing. Additionally, Dennedy's appointment is one of many ducks that Sun is getting in a row as it gears up to make some allegedly blockbuster cloud computing announcements in New York City on March 18.

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Based out of Reston, Va., ScienceLogic CEO David Link is no Silicon Valley insider. He might as well be, though, because the technology that ScienceLogic has cooked up in the form of it's 7-in-1 EM7 data center management appliance is the sort of solution that usually requires a patchwork of solutions from the management titans normally associated with such functionality: BMC, CA, IBM, and HP.

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The satellite imagery in Google Earth and Google Maps is the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater, which is to say that it's not protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.

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Web application security is of particular importance because so much of our digital life is spent interacting with Web applications. Lori MacVittie, technical marketing manager with F5 and former Network Computing senior technology editor, has spent years kicking the question of where application security belongs -- in the network or the application -- back and forth. But I want to draw a line in the sand: Don't depend on Web application firewalls to fix your software problems.

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There's been a persistent rumor circulating that Virtual Iron is about to be acquired, fueled in part by a recent Jefferies & Co. research report that said Oracle was interested in the virtualization startup. Why would Oracle, with its own Oracle VM, want a third-tier player in the virtualization market?

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If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to check out our first ever ReviewCam. Using video, the goal of our ReviewCams is to put you up close and personal with an editor's-eye-view of Web services or software.

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