In a clear sign that Cloud Computing is moving rapidly up the technology adoption curve; there are numerous Cloud Computing conferences scheduled within the next 8 months.

Many of these conferences coincidentally overlap and there are now an equal number of conferences in Europe and Asia versus the USA.

Some of the more interesting conferences include:

CC Cloud Computing 2010
23-24 November 2010
Singapore

Cloud Computing AustralAsia
23-24 November 2010
Sydney, Australia

IEEE CloudCom Conference
30 November 2010 to 3 December 2010
Indianapolis, IN

Cloud Forum 2010
30 November 2010
Utrech, Nederland

DreamForce 2010
6-9 December 2010
San Francisco, CA

Cloud Expo NL
8-9 December 2010
Utrecht, Nederland

Cloud Expo Europe
2-3 February 2011
London, England

Cloud Connect
7-10 March 2011
Santa Clara, CA

Cloud Computing World Forum Middle East and Africa
9 March 2011
Dubai, UAE

Structure Big Data
23 March 2011
New York, NY

Cloud Computing China Congress
24 March 2011
Beijing, China

CIO Cloud Summit
10-13 April 2011
Scottsdale, AZ

Closer 2011
7-9 May 2011
Noordwijkerhout, Nederland

Cloud Expo New York
6-9 June 2011
New York, NY

Cloud Computing World Forum
21-22 June 2011
London, England

Structure 2011
22-23 June 2011
San Francisco, CA

IEEE Cloud 2011 Conference
5-10 July 2011
Washington DC

The tech industry has been abuzz the past week now that the Oracle acquisition of Sun has cleared the last hurdle from the European Union and is officially complete.

Oracle and Sun executives have begun addressing a number of questions about how Oracle will integrate Suns various hardware, system and software stacks into the Oracle ecosystem.

Two areas of integration that hold quite a bit of interest to this blog’s readers are Oracle + Sun’s Cloud and Virtualization Strategies. In the following prerecorded videos Richard Sarwal SVP of Product Development and Edward Screven; Chief Corporate Architect, give insight into Oracle’s future strategy.

Oracle Europe has scheduled what is being billed as the first Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference focused on Europe on 19 February 2009.

Although I am sure most of the content will focus on Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 technology solutions, the conference should be interesting in that the keynote by Dennis Krueger will focus on Enterprise 2.0 trends in Europe for 2009. Dennis is the publisher of JDK DE, the largest ECM information portal in Deutschland.

The conference is scheduled to have 5 concurrent tracks available in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

Expect to see quite a few more conferences go the virtual route over the next 2 or 3 years as the hard realities of the recession sink into most companies travel budget.

Lewis Hamilton Becomes Youngest F1 Champion
Will start off this edition of OnDemand Speed Links with a congrats to Lewis Hamilton on winning his first (of many I am sure) Formula 1 Championship earlier this month at the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum
Article from Reuven Cohen that goes into detail about the goals of the recently form Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum

IBM Offers to Validate the Cloud
IBM has jumped wholeheartedly into the Cloud Computing Services Arena with this weeks announcement of Cloud Computing validation and consulting services.

EC2 vs Azure vs App Engine
Abel Avram’s overview of the pros and cons of the 3 major cloud platforms.

Has Omniture Figured Out How to Make Money with SaaS
Phil Wainewright blogged about Omniture CEO Josh James formula for turning a profit while offering a SaaS solution. With the current economic malaise and credit freeze this is great free advice that SaaS founders should heed.

Is now a good time for Cloud Computing Adoption
Kelly Glynn opines that the current economic recession is good for overall adoption of Cloud Computing. I would agree that Cloud Computing adoption should increase for companies that have a compelling reason to change their current computing environments due to cost and or inefficiencies.

Who Gets the most ROI from Cloud Computing
Bernard Golden; in his review  of the recent SDForum Cloud Symposium, explains who is getting the most ROI from Cloud Computing. Bernard mentioned the main beneficiaries of Cloud Computing today seem to start ups, the entertainment industry, small business and large enterprises.

Balancing out the Forrester Gloom and Doom Predictions
With the recent predictions by Forrester and other of a pending large drop in Enterprise 2.0 product prices, Bill Ives asks what about market size as an additional predictor of Enterprise 2.0 product success.

XING is the great Web 2.0 Hope
Ian Hendry; over on ZDnet UK, gives a bit of hope to the Web 2.0 crowd with the example of Germany Based Xing AG as a Web 2.0 company that can actually generate real revenue with a real business model.

Web 3.0 is PR and Marketings next Great Hope
When did the trendy term Web 3.0 replace the straightforward term Semantic Web? Now that the Web 2.0 gravy train appears to be at its merciful end, Web 3.0 rushes in to save thousands of marketing, PR and conference planning jobs:)

There are a number of conferences and workshops with themes related to the Semantic Web being held in the last quarter of 2008.

First up is the 7th annual International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) being held in Karlsruhe, Deutschland on Oct 26 – Oct 30 2008. The ISWC 2008 conference will have a strong focus on Semantic Web Ontology and research.

The OntoContent 2008 workshop is being held in Monterrey Mexico on November 28 2008. This conference has many workshops relating to Semantic Ontologies.

The International Workshop on Interacting with Multimedia Content in the Social Semantic Web (IMC-SSW) will be held on Dec 3 2008 in Koblenz, Deutschland. This workshop; held in conjunction with the Semantic and Digital Media Technologies Conference, has topics that explore utilizing Semantic Web technology with multimedia.

On December 8th – Dec 11 2008, the 3rd Annual Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand. This conference normally focuses on Semantic Web Services, Applications and Social Networking.

Trampoline Systems; a London Based provider of Enterprise Social Software, recently launched SONAR FlightDeck at the Network Roundtable in Washington DC.

SONAR Flightdeck is the latest product in Trampoline Systems SONAR Suite product line. Flightdeck is a enterprise social networking tool that helps companies focus on knowledge and relationship identification.

Flightdeck works by gathering high value strategic information gathered in everyday corporate communications such as email, wiki’s, blogs and documents and helps managers visualize and identify the top influencers and performers , bottlenecks and even the social networking laggards within a company.

Flightdeck runs on top of the SONAR Server which is an analytical engine that is composed of natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms that identify the information flows, social networks and tasks occurring within a company.

Flightdeck would be most beneficial to companies that are engaging in merger and acquisitions, new product roll-outs or major corporate initiatives. SONAR Flightdeck is designed for managers within an organization whereas Trampoline Systems other product SONAR Dashboard is designed for general employee usage.

Trampoline Systems competitors in this space include Microsoft, (with its recent acquisition of Powerset) Autonomy and Semantra.

There are a number of great insights about Web 2.0 tools and technologies in the enterprise space that are provided by the top analyst firms and dedicated to executives & IT professionals.  Since my day-to-day experience at Yooplus is working with the Italian and European markets, I may be able to add some additional insights on Enterprise 2.0 adoption across Europe.

IDC’s View:

“The adoption rate for Enterprise 2.0 will nearly double in Europe in the next 18 months, and nearly half will use Web 2.0 to enhance internal collaboration,” according to a survey conducted by IDC that has been presented in September 2007 at the European ICT Forum in Berlin.  “Surprisingly, Spain, Denmark, and Italy are the early-adopting nations of Europe and will continue to show the highest adoption rates over the next 18 months, even ahead of the UK and Germany,” said Pim Bilderbeek, vice president of European telecommunications and networking consulting for IDC.

McKinsey’s View:

“July 2008. This year’s worldwide survey reveals continuing investments in Web 2.0. Companies that are deriving business value from these tools are now shifting from using them experimentally to adopting them as part of a broader business practice.   Fundamental changes are beginning to take place among the satisfied companies as a result of their ambitious use of Web 2.0. These companies are not only using more technologies but also leveraging them to change management practices and organizational structures. Some are taking steps to open their corporate “ecosystems” by encouraging customers to join them in developing products and by using new tools to tap distributed knowledge. Overall satisfaction of Web 2.0 adoption, in Europe, was split with 22% reporting the lowest dissatisfaction and 20% reporting highest satisfaction, leaving 58% somewhere in the middle.”

What I See:

• Managers and professionals don’t want to wait for IT or consultants to get around to implementing their social enterprise solutions: they are looking for rapid adoption and deployment. They want to test and determine the value, benefits and competitive advantages quickly
• They want to pick, choose and customize their social enterprise environments, they want the flexibility of all the tools (blogs, wikis, rss, tags, search, im, voip, etc) integrated in one social platform
• They want to empower their teams to collaborate and share information, ideas, knowledge, communications and productivity not just internally, but also externally with partners, vendors and customers
• The social enterprise paradigm is not just for the big corporations but for all sizes and industries, from start-ups to non-profits, from waste managements to financial services as it is for every department within companies, from marketing to human resources.

Adoption of Enterprise 2.0 or the “social enterprise” is happening across Europe, some countries more aggressively than others, but now I am beginning to see return on the investment and real business benefits for all sizes of companies.  There are also a volume of tools and technologies available from high-end consultant assisted solutions to rapid adoption and deployment of social enterprise platforms. Because after all “sharing is better!”

Thomas Christel  is co-founder and VP of marketing at Yooplus srl, a social enterprise company, providing the we+ workspace, a team collaboration and social software platform with all the Web 2.0 tools built-in (blogs, wiki, rss and tags). The we+ workspace provides the ability to capture and share knowledge, provide project/activity transparency and improve team communications, collaboration and productivity. To learn more visit, www.yooplus.com or contact Thomas at t.christel {at} yooplus(.)com

In the three months since I posted an initial Review of Business ByDesign in the OnDemand Beat, there has been a flurry of announcements and activity relating to the roll out date of the product.

Larry Dignan and Dennis Howlett broke the news the week before the annual SAP Sapphire event, that the planned 2009 rollout of Business ByDesign was to be delayed by up to 18 months.

Vinnie Mirchandani and a few of the other Enterprise Irregulars had a chance to meet with SAP Co-CEO’s Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker at Sapphire 08 and found out that there were a couple of key reasons why SAP pulled back on the original planned release date.

These are valid reasons indeed to delay Business ByDesign’s launch and might in this case actually help lead to a better product.

But in the meantime one can be certain that Netsuite (with its recent OneWorld release) and other OnDemand ERP competitors wont sit still during the next 18 months and SAP will have quite a bit more work to do to gain market share and partner acceptance of Business ByDesign once released.

One of the factors that has so far hindered wider adoption of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service in the US is a lack of consistent and inexpensive broadband service throughout the entire US.

A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation ranks the US 15th (Yes that’s right 15th) globally for broadband adoption. The US ranked number 4 in 2001 so this drop off in adoption is very alarming considering that we are in the midst of a major fundamental change in enterprise computing with Cloud Computing and Software as a Service becoming more prevalent.

The ITIF broadband policy report measures 3  major factors; price, speed, and availability to come up with its rankings. 

The report has numerous recommendations to improve US broadband adoption and also has case studies from countries that rank both above and below the US in terms of adoption.

Three recommendations that I think may have an impact in the short term if adopted include:

• Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation.  (This will help immensely with making broadband less expensive for SMB customers and start-ups and give the incumbent Telco and Cable providers incentive to modernize their aging infrastructure)

• Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks. (This is critical as has been proven in Korea…more and more Enterprise 2.0 and Saas applications will be available via mobile devices)

• Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available. (For the US to be more competitive in the future, Broadband access has to be universal throughout the US. Satellite broadband is relatively expensive and Satellite service is a still a bit spotty)

Unfortunately many of the recommendations in the report are based on government policy and that policy is always up to change depending on who occupies state and federal government positions.

But alas, a government broadband policy is crucial as the higher broadband adoption rates in countries like Sweden (pdf) South Korea (pdf) and Japan (pdf) were achieved via strong and focused government broadband policies.