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.

One reason for sure that folks are gravitating to Twitter is the service is easy to use and universally accessible on the web and mobile devices. This reminds me of another “service” that is on the web and mobile devices: email. But email has become compromised with spam and junk that makes the mailbox a scary place.

Twitter’s success reminds of Blackberry’s early days in financial services and how the device forever changed the way people could have access to their email and remain in contact with their colleagues via email.

Is our collective email experience becoming so much less desirable that other services like Twitter will take hold and displace the traditional inbox? To be continued…..

We already know Microsoft has a service called Microsoft Online which offers managed PC desktops and will soon add hosted Exchange and Sharepoint to the menu. For quite a while now, Microsoft has been managing the desktops as a service provider for Energizer Holdings and XL Capital. Now smaller companies will be able to subscribe to these offerings.

It is still unclear where the channel partner fits in this new “direct to customer” world. Microsoft Online doesn’t mean there is no role for its channel partners, but clearly something will have to change in this new SaaS-y world.

Despite all this initial enthusiasm, there are some larger questions that need to be answered: such as is there really a need for another desktop email/calendar/PIM software client? Does the rise in popularity of Gmail and hosted collaboration apps negate the need for thick clients? and can Mozilla Messaging succeed where the Chandler Project could not? Maybe.

Chandler is an ambitious open source project to create an alternative to Outlook. Thunderbird has the same mission statement, but a better code base and an actual shipping product, with a world-wide audience. Chandler has yet to ship v1.0 after many years in development. So they are behind in terms of a real audience. The Thunderbird audience of enthusiastic users is definitely a plus for Mozilla Messaging.

With Web 2.0 getting a lot of attention these days, desktop client software should be thought of, in a larger sense, as connected to a web service component for easier data portability and accessibility. This is the real power Mozilla could bring to messaging: totally up-end the e-communications market with a slick cross-platform client connected to a hosted infrastructure that offers server-based processing and centralized content storage, all from a user-centric view point, not tied to one specific service provider. Marrying Thunderbird to a “personal” cloud-compute account seems very interesting.

Today EngineYard, an early pioneer in Rails hosting and innovation, announced receiving a $3 million Series A investment round. This is great validation for Rails, and the Engine yard team.

Why does this matter to the Sonian audience? Glad you asked! Sonian is at the intersection of the next wave of new Internet technology and business models, with the resulting product an efficient, reliable, affordable, easy to use web service that helps customers solve their archiving, compliance and e-discovery pain points.

Some interesting takeaways, courtesy of Techcrunch analysis:

• Noting that, in 2007, Internet stocks delivered a 14 percent return versus 5 percent for the S&P 500, JPMorgan expects 34 percent earnings growth in 2008 for the Internet stocks it covers versus 8 percent earnings growth for the S&P 500.
• In general, as broadband penetration continues to rise, so do e-commerce revenues.
• Free cash flow at large Internet companies will keep going up, fueling M&A and share buybacks. JPMorgan estimates that free cash flow among just five of the top Internet companies (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and Expedia) will rise from $8.8 billion last year to $12.5 billion in 2008. That is a lot of money for Web 2.0 acquisitions. Top acquirers Yahoo and Google, for instance, each spend about a third of their free cash flow on acquisitions.
• As global GDP continues to grow faster than U.S. GDP (3.9 percent versus 2.2 percent in 2007), Internet companies with global reach will benefit. Amazon, eBay, and Google all get about half their revenues from international markets. Yahoo gets only a quarter of its revenues from abroad.

Sonian has been under non-disclosure about SimpleDB, but now that the service is publicly announced we can finally talk about how we use it to manage the metadata for our hosted archive.

Historically, managing the object metadata for an email archive has always been the Achilles heel for many archive solutions. In the past, typically a SQL database is paired with a file storage system to create the archive data storage system. But SQL is not the best place to store message metadata considering the semi-structured nature of the email data type. SimpleDB allows us to solve the metadata problem more elegantly and efficiently than current archive vendors can with their SQL server designs.

I will post more information about Sonian inner-workings over the next few weeks.

How many times have you tried to send a 50Mb ZIP file to someone only to have the message bounce back because the file is too large, or the receiving system doesn’t accept ZIP attachments? FreeSender is the solution to this problem.

FreeSender is the perfect way to send someone a file without having to worry about email attachment size and type restrictions blocking your transmission.

Why are we making this service available for free? Because Sonian is all about providing a “premium” experience for our audience. Premium for us means delivering outstanding value at a fair price. Well in this case we’re making a useful utility available at no cost. It’s our way of showing the market what to expect from Sonian in the future, as we start to launch our hosted archiving service.

Here is some background on FreeSender and why we are making it available for free. FreeSender is powered by Amazon S3 – a revolutionary hosted storage facility that is also used in the Sonian Archive. We have been working with Amazon Web Services for over a year now, prototyping the use of grid storage systems to solve archive and e-discovery problems. FreeSender is a by-product of our research.

Stay tuned for more free services, and the unveiling of Sonian Archive.

I have been closely watching the up-take in web 2.0 applications and services being used in more and larger organizations. And others are starting to study this trend as well.

Over the past month major IT analysts like Gartner and Forrester have surveyed the attitudes and trends IT executives have about web 2.0 technologies.

It’s useful to define how the term web 2.0 is used here. “Web 2.0″ is a broad catch-all term to describe everything from YouTube, Digg and Del.icio.us, to Basecamp, Facebook, and WordPress. For this post, web 2.0 means a web service that is easy to use, relatively inexpensive, and offers a focused feature set to solve a specific problem. Web 2.0 is most likely used for collaboration, project and personal/group information management. A key trait is a typical web 2.0 application can be adopted at the individual or departmental level.

We have seen this trend before: knowledge workers have a problem that needs to be solved, IT may not act quickly, so a solution is adopted “under the radar.” Email in the early 1990′s came in the enterprise at departmental levels before being deployed top-down across the organization. PDA’s and Blackberry’s followed the same “ground-up” enterprise penetration.

The survey results below show that CIO’s are starting to personally use classic web 2.0 services like wiki’s, blogs, and business-focused social networking tools. This could mean we’ll start to see a “top-down” implementation of web 2.0 in the enterprise.

Which of the following Web applications do you use personally?

N=150 Video over the web 54% Wikis 49 Blogs 48 RSS (Really Simple Syndication) 47 Podcasts 39 Social networking (e.g., tagging, social bookmarks, community sites such as del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Technorati) 33 Expertise location and sharing 21 Mashups 13 Virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) 12 Instant mobile updates (e.g., Twitter) 11 None of the above 11

Source: CIO Insight, August 2007

IT departments need to understand how strategically deployed web 2.0 IT services can be a good thing for the organizations they serve. Eventually end-users will find the solutions they desire (often times end-users are closest to and most knowledgeable about, their own needs.)

IT should get ahead of the web 2.0 movement.