Microsoft has announced the next version of the Outlook email client will improve email productivity by 10 percent. We don’t know all the specifics yet, but most likely the improvements will be about information triage and efficient filing. Assuming 10% is accurate, apply the math to a company with 1,000 employees and you can see how even small improvements get amplified across the enterprise.

Sonian is interested in the email efficiency theme and has some exciting ideas on how to make email work better for all users, regardless of email client. Look for more news on this topic in early 2010.

Sonian will access AWS’s infrastructure services from multiple Availability Zones in Singapore in the first half of 2010, then in other Availability Zones within Asia over the second half of 2010.

For $5 per user per month you get 35 Gb of storage, Outlook connector and a AJAXy web UI plus Ironport email security. This new offering will be an interesting platform to watch and see if Cisco can win collaboration business away from Microsoft, IBM, Novell and Google.

Sonian will provide hosted archiving services for this new platform.

SAS70 certifies that AWS has had an in-depth audit of its controls, specifically as it relates to operational performance and security to safeguard customer data. All Sonian customers benefit from this attention to security and operating efficiency.

Hosted archiving does not require any on-premises hardware or software, and enables the IT department to focus on other projects without worrying about email retention and long term storage.

I and Sonian board member John Landry will join other technologists and entrepreneurs to talk about cloud computing’s impact on the IT climate for startups, small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises, and consumers. Register to attend this event as well as Cloud Camp at the link above.

Over the next three years a majority of compute workloads will migrate from  non-cloud on-premises  infrastructure to a hybrid public/private cloud ecosystem. Cloud means scale up in real-time to process data and then scale down when the work is done. No wasted compute power sitting idle.

The winners will be the companies that early on figured out how to harness the cloud infrastructure as a service for SaaS delivery and those that provide enabling technologies to help IT buyers get more value for their IT budget dollars. Sonian’s Universal Data Management cloud-powered platform is one such example of putting the cloud to good use today, solving the information governance pain point in a modern, secure, reliable and efficient manner.

Sonian is committed to provide hosted archiving support for all Novell collaboration platforms (GroupWise, Pulse, Sitescape)  and looks forward to working with Novell as Pulse evolves from alpha, to beta and shipping product.

Cloud-powered archiving does not penalize a simple straightforward “keep it all” plan. This means IT decision makers can implement retention archiving now, and create policies later. It’s a Win-Win scenario for IT and businesses, and is the cure to “policy paralysis.”