Sonian is in the forefront of 5 out of 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2010.

Cloud computing, advanced analytics, green IT and virtualization are all poised to see tremendous growth in the next year because each of these trends ultimately helps customers “do more for less IT budget.”

1. Cloud Computing. Leverage on-demand CPU and storage to solve archival and information governance needs.

2. Advanced Analytics. The cloud is the best place to analyze your terabytes of “dark data” into actionable intelligence.

3. IT for Green. Lower electricity and cooling needs to save money and the planet.

4. Social Computing. Personal and work life as it relates to IT systems are more entwined now than ever before.

5. Virtualization for Availability. Use a “hybrid IT model” – keep some services on-premise and move ancillary to a virtualization layer in the cloud.

Traditional enterprise software was not created to take advantage of the cloud’s ability to scale horizontally on-demand “up and down.” To truly embrace cloud computing new software stacks are required to break with the past constraints of fixed CPU to process more work for less costs. It’s the smart way and the right way to manage enterprise IT needs.

The great economics and SaaS ease of use are driving this increased adoption curve. And SaaS powered by cloud infrastructure can be a virtual secure extension of your own data center. but running from reliable infrastructure maintained by experts whose only goal is to keep cloud servers and storage running 24x7x365.

It’s exciting and enormously fulfilling  to be at the beginning of this 4th wave of computing era.

For companies with less than 15,000 employees hosted had significant savings compared to installed software solutions.

But an even more interesting finding is that more than half of enterprises will blend hosted email services with on-premise email servers. Hosted security and email archiving services are the perfect compliment to an Exchange, GroupWise or Notes server.

*(We jest about the mechanical engine, but if it were 1900 this is what our system would look like )

Cloud computing is also ushering in a new era of transparency and accountability between IT vendors and customers. The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because snafus in the cloud don’t happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises business solutions. When a cloud compute service has a problem, everyone knows. And let’s face facts: no IT (cloud or on-premise) solution is immune to problems, but cloud systems by their very nature recover more quickly and are built with true 24x7x365 design goals. Cloud-powered SaaS is the equivalent of a 24 hour news cable channel with millions of daily viewers. The iconic TV test pattern can’t display for very long without losing the audience.

We look forward to the competition from on-premise vendors and their reliability claims compared to cloud-powered SaaS. As a point of reference, according to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email-related solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month. Hosted services provide much better up time, on average, than software/appliance based solutions.

True ROI and TCO is comprised of factroring some or all of the items below, plus the software fees, maintenance fees, and hardware costs:

1. People cost
2. Bandwidth cost
3. Maintainence cost
4. Hardware cost
5. Electric cost
6. Downtime cost
7. Redundancy cost
8. Software license cost
9. Cost of floor space used
10. Response time

In general, the survey shows executives expect SaaS to help:

• lower overall IT costs
• allow their organizations to focus on the core business and not be distracted with infrastructure hassles
• choose best of breed solutions without locking into one vendor

The cloud, driven by four big things, none of which are hype, and all of which are changing the way we compute.

1. Power and cooling are expensive. Today, it costs far more to run computers than it does to buy them in the first place. To save on power, we’re building data centers near dams; for cooling, we’re considering using decommissioned ships. This is about economics and engineering.
2. Demand is global. Storage itself may be cheap, but data processing at scale is hard to do. With millions of consumers using a service, putting data next to computing is the only way to satisfy them.
3. Computing is ubiquitous. We’ve lost our desktop affinity. Most of the devices in the world that can access the Internet aren’t desktops; they’re cell phones. Keeping applications and content on a desktop isn’t just old-fashioned — it’s inconvenient.
4. Applications are built from massive, smart parts. Clouds give developers building blocks they couldn’t build themselves, from storage to authentication to friend feeds to CRM interfaces, letting coders stand on the shoulders of giants.

Many parallels have been drawn between the dawning age of cloud computing, and Bill Gates retirement from Microsoft last week. One era passes to the next: the 3rd wave of computing, which was dominated by heavy client server applications and a legacy IT mindset, is now shifting to the 4th wave, which is embracing on-demand infrastructure and applications that deliver just-in-time functionality at a reasonable cost. This is the beauty and the promise of cloud computing to solve more and more IT pain points. All the while preserving security and reliability to the satisfaction of more and more enterprises looking to leap ahead of the status quo.