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.

It’s this evolution of communication habits and preferences that is exciting to watch and be part of. Whether it’s an email or a tweet, it still content that is created by a person and shared. Sometimes its personal, sometimes its business. And in a corporate setting that content needs to be preserved for a variety of reasons: compliance, posterity, storage management and best business practices. That’s where Sonian lives. Preserving this content as your “trusted digital caretaker.”

Sonian is at the nexus of three waves of change: Rising interest in cloud computing, increasing demand for software as a service, and a mandate to get the best return on IT budget investment.

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.

The consumer space is full of free web services that manage your email, photos and blogs. And the free services are supported by advertising revenue on the back end data assets.

But is the enterprise going to embrace a free service to help with critical archiving or disaster recovery needs? Customers thinking about using a free service for infrastructure need to be wary of the vendors commitment to the service.

Free may seem appealing, but think about the long-term viability of a company that hopes to monetize at some point in the future. They may not make it.

We couldn’t agree more with Gartner on this matter. Sonian Hosted Email Archiving uses cloud compute infrastructure to deliver best of breed, world-class archival and e-discovery services leveraging the superior reliability and economics of cloud infrastructure.

According to Daryl Plummer, managing vice president at Gartner, said in a statement businesses are now “crossing the threshold” of using the Internet for communications, into a much more dynamic technology model. At this point “then we truly start to head for an economy based on consumption of everything from storage to computation to video to finance deduction.”

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.

We’re giving away a pair of Red Sox tickets each day at 2:30, so come on by and we look forward to seeing you at the Amazon booth.