Coop's Corner

For the last decade, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has promoted his pet idea that traditional application software was destined for obsolescence.

He was a few years early, but Benioff understood computer history better than his detractors.

Most of the hosted on-demand application vendors, or ASPs as we called them back then, crashed and burned. Not only did they burn through money at a frightful clip, but the technology they used was thin, relying on single-tenant, non-scalable computing architecture models that left a trail of dissatisfied customers.

In the post-Internet bubble world, however, the proliferation of cheap hardware combined with an abundance of Internet infrastructure created ripe conditions for Benioff and others to figure out how to do it the right way. Oracle, Microsoft and other big software makers weren't in immediate peril, but they caught on to the new reality: More customers were accessing the Internet to subscribe to programs like customer management software

With roots in computer clustering and grid computing, the technology that first sprouted during the ASP era of the late 1990s is now the computing topic du jour. There's understandable reason for the excitement but advocates of cloud computing now have to battle the inevitable hype that attends any major technology shift.

So what is cloud computing? The definition game can lead you down a rabbit's hole. After all, isn't the Web itself a form of cloud computing? As Greg Cruey noted, we're all accessing Web pages that reside in the cloud. But the buzz in 2009 about cloud computing isn't so much about a computing architecture as it is a style of computing.

For the IT world, the promise is a a faster, easier, and more affordable way to provision computing resources. Gartner thinks about cloud computing as a system where massively scalable IT capabilities would get delivered as a service. The important advantage for enterprise-level customers is that would have the ability to scale up and down, depending upon the amount of computing resources they might need.

The pay-as-you-go model embraced by Amazon and a host of others is one approach. Another is the platform as a service model embodied by the likes of Force.com from Salesforce and AppEngine from Google. And, of course, there are the myriad end user apps which reside in the cloud used by hundreds of millions of people each day.

"What is cloud computing? " said Tien Tzuo, the CEO of Zuora, a start up which specializes in subscriptions as a service. "Anything where you don't need to own your own physical infrastructure--simply write your code and deploy it on someone else's servers."

Tzuo points to a confluence of factors which have helped usher in the change. Bandwidth is finally everywhere, the security and privacy issues around storing data online don't raise as many hackles among individuals and companies (though they still linger), and the widespread adoption of technologies like open source means that inexpensive hosted software components are now ubiquitous.

You see what that means in the field every day. A company no longer needs to buy software--or a big data center, for that matter. Instead, it can launch applications by choosing among different types of Internet infrastructure, such as AppEngine or Salesforce.

That's a big deal in an economic downturn, when a lot of start-ups in business simply are too strapped for funding to divert money to buy and staff their own computing infrastructure.

So how did we arrive here?
Like most technology transitions, this was a gradual evolution with antecedents in attempts to move beyond EDI toward a world of Internet scale distributed computing with Web services. Much of the 1990s was dominated by esoteric debates over alphabet soup-style technical standards to help further this along. Then computer scientists Ian Foster, Steven Tuecke and Carl Kesselman authored a paper on how to extend the clustering concept. (Clustering was a popular IT technique that allowed a system to automatically decide which CPU should run a particular piece of code.) In practice, their road map for the grid was akin to a metered utility service where a company plugs into the electricity grid and pays only for what it uses.

But before moving off the drawing board, lingering infrastructure issues still needed to get resolved. Paul Wallis, the CTO of Stroma Software, has a very good analysis summing this up:

One of the hurdles that had to be jumped with the move from clustering to grid was data residency. Because of the distributed nature of the Grid the computational nodes could be situated anywhere in the world. It was fine having all that CPU power available, but the data on which the CPU performed its operations could be thousands of miles away, causing a delay (latency) between data fetch and execution. CPUs need to be fed and watered with different volumes of data depending on the tasks they are processing. Running a data intensive process with disparate data sources can create a bottleneck in the I/O, causing the CPU to run inefficiently, and affecting economic viability.

Storage management, security provisioning and data movement became the nuts to be cracked in order for grid to succeed. A toolkit, called Globus, was created to solve these issues, but the infrastructure hardware available still has not progressed to a level where true grid computing can be wholly achieved.

By the early part of this decade, some of those infrastructure issues began to get resolved with the emergence of huge data center services. Cloud implementations adopted by Amazon and others featured the grid idea's payer-per-use concept. It also proved a boon to small developers who now did not need to own their own physical infrastructures. They simply could write their code and then deploy it on someone else's servers

Of course, nothing in computing moves in a smooth progression from A to Z. And with the emergence of cloud computing have come calls to standardize both the APIs as well as the platform services which underlie those services. Otherwise, some caution, you run the risk of cloud computing vendor lock-in. Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo put it bluntly in a post on the topic last fall:

The APIs provided by Amazon's cloud computing platform (EC2/S3/EBS/etc) are radically different from those provided by Google App Engine (Datastore API/Python runtime/Images API/etc). For zero lock-in to occur in this space, there need to be multiple providers of the same underlying APIs. Otherwise, migrating between cloud computing platforms will be more like switching your application from Ruby on Rails and MySQL to Django and PostgreSQL (i.e. a complete rewrite).

If history is a guidepost, most of these petty disputes will get smoothed over in time. Not so much because the vendors will feel compelled to do the right thing but because customers will force them to act in their enlightened self interest. The more difficult question to consider is how long it will take before businesses regularly tap cloud services to make money. That's when you'll know it's become part of the computing mainstream.

See also:
• Salesforce.com: Pondering the next 10 years
• The three routes to cloud computing's future

History in the making: Berners-Lee's original schematic for a client/server model for a distributed hypertext system.

Is it already 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee authored "Information Management: A proposal" and set the technology world on fire?

Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not help matters that the place was chockablock with incompatible computers people brought with them to the office.

"When two years is a typical length of stay, information is constantly being lost. The introduction of the new people demands a fair amount of their time and that of others before they have any idea of what goes on. The technical details of past projects are sometimes lost forever, or only recovered after a detective investigation in an emergency. Often, the information has been recorded, it just cannot be found."

So he got to work on a document, which is amazing to read with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. But it would take Berners-Lee another couple of years before he could demo his idea. Even then, the realization of his theory had to wait until the middle of the 1990s when Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen popularized the notion of commercial Web browsing with Netscape.

Images: Berners-Lee and the dawn of the Web

And as prescient as the CERN document was, not even Berners-Lee could imagine where his basic design was about to lead. To wit, part of his very modest conclusions:

"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

"The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use."

So it is that on Friday, Berners-Lee and other personages involved in the development of the Web will congregate at the particle physics lab to celebrate. I can't make the event, but from one side of the pond to the other, here's a virtual toast to Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a job very well done.

OpSource is hosting a very timely conference in San Francisco this week on software-as-a-service. What with the meltdown in the economy and continuing concern about the cost and environmental impact of energy use, there's interest in how cloud computing will impact the IT world.

And what better way to cut through the hype over the so-called green aspects of SaaS than to assemble veteran technologists who might share their experiences with the uninitiated? That's the usual format: People ready to impart knowledge to people eager to receive knowledge.

(Credit: CNET News)

Good idea but, well, maybe another day.

As I sat in a cavernous ballroom in San Francisco's Westin St. Francis Hotel scribbling down notes, it dawned on me that I was one of, literally, a handful of people listening to the lecturer. At most, there were 10 or 15 of us--a pity because as he faced a sea of mostly empty seats, Randy Bias, a technology strategist for GoGrid, a supplier of cloud computing infrastructure, offered up a convincing brief on the energy-saving advantages of virtualization and why it makes sense to offload server functions to the cloud.

He was followed on stage by Adrian Bowles, a director at Datamonitor, who was equally eloquent about why there are compelling business reasons to rip up the procedures of hardware provisioning that IT followed until the recession (some call it a depression) hit. "The old days of 'buy it, plug it in, and run it' are probably gone forever," Bowles said, proceeding to lay out a hard-headed case on behalf of going green.

By then, I counted eight people--eight--in the ballroom (not including the speaker). Most of the folks attending this two-day kaffeeklatsch couldn't be bothered with a topic that obviously bored them silly. No matter that green tech at its most basic is technology done with a low environmental impact. For some reason, a discussion of low-energy technologies, virtualization, and improved cooling techniques weren't enough to hook them.

As they used to say back in my Brooklyn neighborhood, whaddya gonna do? But truth be told, I was puzzled by all the no-shows. It wasn't as if the other sessions being held at the same time--"SaaS marketing in a downturn" and "Architecting and delivery for SaaS success"--were so much more thrilling.

Could it be that "green" remains too squishy a concept for most of these red-blooded show-me-the-money types? I buttonholed one attendee in a hallway, who agreed as he was munching down a free ice cream provided by the show's sponsors. But the proverbial man on the street interview doesn't suffice.

I heard it said at one of the sessions how IT compensation plans now hinge on how successful you are doing projects faster and doing them more inexpensively. That's why SaaS advocates believe their timing couldn't be any better. Maybe that's misplaced optimism; we'll see as the year progresses.

But this much is clear: telling the boss that you're saving the environment in the process is not likely to be the clincher. Ever.

The fun thing about looking over the shoulders of computer scientists doing product demos isn't necessarily the technology they're pointing to on their computer screens. So many beta programs wind up on the cutting-room floor that it's impossible to predict with much confidence which ones ultimately will transmogrify into hit products. But more often than not, you can find clues about the direction a company wants to head.

Mashups for use in collaborative medicine?

(Credit: IBM)

So it was that while getting a look Thursday in San Francisco at what IBM Research's been working on, I heard the phrase "social networking" mentioned so often that it sometimes sounded like a Web 2.0 revival meeting. No worries. I have it on good authority that IBM is not planning to hatch a microblogging competitor to Twitter. (Imagine the ensuing bloviation-fest if the TechMeme posse got its hands on that tidbit. Happily, we'll be spared that spectacle.) Instead, IBM is putting serious effort into finding ways to use aspects of social computing for more collaboration among enterprise users. The big idea here being to make it easier for businesses to share corporate data in more useful fashion.

"Our perspective comes from business," said Rod Smith, a computer scientist who is in charge of emerging Internet technologies at IBM. "There are many ecosystems inside the enterprise and we're seeing how they want to expand those connections. So, we're looking at how to do that."

Thus, it was show-and-tell time at what IBM dubbed its "Smarter Web Open House." The labs folks were offering a peek at a cross-section of collaborative Web technologies--mostly in early beta stages and likely to need a lot more fine-tuning in the months ahead. Here are my notes of the highlights:

•  Play-by-Play: Collaborative Web browsing via instant messaging. You can connect your Internet browser to someone else's browser and you're co-browsing with somebody else. What's particularly nice is a re-sync feature that lets the person on the other end of the connection replay the sequence of Web pages you visited. That's an idea which many a help desk would find handy.

Play-by-Play:Web browsing via instant messaging

(Credit: IBM)

•  CoScripter: Using some of the same back-end technologies as Play-by-Play, CoScripter puts an encrypted chronological history of your computing day on your hard drive. Again, it's a feature you can deploy to share information--in this case, they call it a script--with someone else inside the organization in need of a quick answer to a question. You'll also be able to publish the scripts on Facebook or on a blog. It's obviously still rough but I could see where it might also have possibilities in the development of a corporate-wide knowledge base.

•  Privacy-aware MarketPlace: The syllables don't easily roll off the tongue, but hey, it is IBM, after all. This is a download to which privacy purists will cotton. Say you're on Facebook and receive an invitation to join a group. Privacy-aware MarketPlace basically acts as a security index. The analogy IBM uses is your credit score. Before connecting with someone, you get a glimpse at other peoples' so-called privacy scores and it recommends settings. This may be of particular utility to any of you out there fond of dissing your boss to others on Facebook.

•  SaND (Social Networks and Discovery): This project comes out of IBM's Haifa, Israel group and hails back to an earlier information retrieval project called Sonar. The idea here being to bring together documents, tags, and other relevant identifying bits of information to find relationships between people. The idea is to be able to find disparate information--ranging from blogs to what people post on their social-networking apps--through keyword search. IBM's handout is cute: It plugs SaND as a way to show "six degrees of separation." John Guare may have something to say about that. Self-serving hype notwithstanding, it represents a start about how to think about building a framework for applications such as recommendation and personalization systems.

•  Blue Spruce: IBM's been going down this path for the last several years. The goal is to turn the Web browser into more of a collaborative platform and let people do something more important to mankind than recording what they just ate for lunch. Part of this is what IBM describes as its "massive mashup" technology, which would offer ways to allow several users to huddle over Web pages and interact in real time as participants mark up the page. The example offered by IBM was the obvious one: a virtual medical room where physicians can review and comment on test data. Doctors have been notoriously slow to embrace Web 2.0 technology but this idea merits more discussion from the medical establishment.

(Credit: CNET News)

"The Internet represents freedom, but not everywhere."

So begins the annual "Internet Enemies" report by Reporters Without Borders--and that's probably the cheeriest line in the entire 39-page document. It goes down from there.

For the uninitiated, Reporters Without Borders is an anti-censorship watchdog organization. As blogs and news Web sites have grown in popularity, the group's focus has similarly migrated to the Internet. Unfortunately, the report again paints a grim picture of Internet freedoms in parts of the world where it says the authorities regularly chuck bloggers in jail for online posts that displease the regime.

Here's the all-star team:

• Burma: Its Internet users rank among the "most threatened," according to Reporters Without Borders. A 1996 law outlaws the import or use of a modem without first receiving government permission. Violators face 15 years in jail for "damaging state security, national unity, culture, the national economy and law and order."

• China: The Chinese government leads all others on this list as far as repression of the Internet. Each day about 40,000 state employees monitor what gets sent over the transom. All blogs that use China's biggest blogging platform must be hosted inside the country. And the country's information ministry is always watching and filtering out information it doesn't like. "With the world's largest number of Internet users, its censorship mechanisms are among the world's most blatant," the report states. At last count, 49 cyberdissidents and bloggers were jailed--the majority for "revealing state secrets abroad."

• Cuba: You can surf the Internet at a tourist hotel, but it's expensive. What's more, Cuba's Supervision and Control Agency will be watching. There's also a national network, but it limits connections to government Web sites. The penalty for posting "counter-revolutionary" articles on a foreign-hosted Web site is 20 years. You get 5 years in the stir for connecting illegally to the international network.

• Egypt: Citing terrorism concerns, the government monitors what gets sent over the Internet. If you want to connect to a Wi-Fi network, the state requires a cell phone number as well as some other piece of identifying information. The police arrested 100 bloggers last year for "damaging national security." Two remain in jail.

• Iran: Has the worst record for Internet repression in the Middle East, according to Reporters Without Borders. News Web sites critical of the Ahmadinejad government routinely get shut down. Political bloggers risk jail time for publicizing incidents deemed harmful to the regime. Esmail Jafari, who edits the blog Rah Mardom, was sentenced to five months in prison last December for posting information about a demonstration in front of the equivalent of city hall in the southwestern Iranian city of Bushehr.

• North Korea: What can I say--it's Kim Jong Il. This is a country that only offered its first mobile phones in 2002--but quickly backtracked, saying only top military commanders could use them. Reporters Without Borders sums it up this way: "North Korea is a model of control of news and information in a country where all forms of communication are at the service of the regime." North Korea has been online since 2000, but "it operates like an Intranet" with a handful of pre-selected news sites that meet government approval.

• Saudi Arabia: The country has a major issue with pornography--along with defamation and "violation of religious values." Of course, there's lots of wiggle room in interpreting what exactly that means. Suffice it to say that the regime has little tolerance for anything deemed counter to the prevailing Wahhabi ideology. "Posting a comment on a Web site deemed "immoral" by the authorities can lead to arrest. This is all the easier since the kingdom does not have a written criminal code."

• Syria: Bashir al-Assad helped introduce Syria to the Internet in 2001. Yet Reporters Without Borders ranks Syria in third place behind China and Vietnam as "one of the world's most repressive countries towards Internet users." Forget about using Google's Blogspot to set up a blog; it's inaccessible. The government has blocked user access to 160 Web sites deemed critical of the regime on what's called the Syrian Web; at last count, five cyberdissidents remained in jail. Skype is censored, and YouTube, Amazon, and Facebook are banned on the Syrian Web.

• Tunisia: Mixed bag. There now exist more than 20 ISPs, and Tunesia ranks as one of the most Web-connected nations in North Africa. Still, the government enforces a strict policy of Internet filtering. The upshot: Lots of self-censorship. Last November, Tunisian bloggers held a one-day protest against blog censorship as 2008 marked a bad year for Internet freedom of expression in the country. By law, ATI, which manages Tunisia's e-mail system, can intercept e-mail that "threatens public order and national security."

• Turkmenistan: Come on, admit it. How many of you even thought Turkmenistan was hooked up to the Internet? But it's there. This is a country that has banned satellite dishes and so the Internet has become the default source of information about what's going on in the outside world. You can get a private connection from a single access provider, Turkmen Telekom. (Wi-Fi arrived last year through a Russian access provider.) Unfortunately, Turkmen Telekom ultimately answers to the country's interior ministry, which blocks sites and snoops on messaging services.

• Uzbekistan: From the counter-intuitive files, until 2006, more people in Uzbekistan had Internet access than had mobile phones. But restrictions on what Uzbeks can read and say on the Internet occasionally lead to sites being banned for no apparent reason. The government acknowledges keeping a secret list of offending Web sites that provide "destructive news" and threaten "security of information."

• Vietnam: With blog use flourishing, the government has established a cyber-police force to keep an eye on "subversive" content. This will be interesting to watch because Vietnam's youthful population can't get enough of this Internet thing. But last month, Vietnam's Minister for Information and Communications offered this thinly disguised warning: "A blog is a personal news page. If a blogger uses it for general news like the press, he is breaking the law and will be punished." Authorities have arrested and sentenced eight people to jail since mid-2006 for because of what they posted online.

The report also makes (dishonorable) mention of nations that are either considering Internet censorship statutes or have been stepping up control over their citizens' use of the Web. These include: Australia, Bahrain, Belarus, Eritrea, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. You can read more about this at the Reporters Without Borders Web site.

OK, it's California. So we are quite used to the rest of the country rolling their eyes in knowing exasperation at our fads. But often, they turn out to be harbingers of national trends. And so the question: Will AB-255 number among them as well?

California Assemblyman Joel Anderson (R-El Cajon)

Last month California Assemblyman, Joel Anderson, introduced a bill to limit the amount of detail someone could see on screen using online mapping tools. It also calls for fines of up to $250,000 per day for violating what Anderson describes "as the same level of protections that foreign governments extend to their own citizens."

Considering the strength of California's high-tech industry, he may be tilting at windmills. However, this isn't the first time that Anderson, a Republican from the San Diego area, has courted controversy. In 2007, he pushed through a state bill that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed, requiring the state's huge pension funds to stop investing in companies that do business with Iran.

Here are the clauses from AB-255 sure to raise hackles in Silicon Valley:

"(a)An operator of a commercial Internet Web site or online service that makes a virtual globe browser available to members of the public shall not provide aerial or satellite photographs or imagery of a building or facility in this state that is identified on the Internet Web site by the operator as a school or place of worship, or a government or medical building or facility, unless those photographs or images have been blurred.

"(b)An operator of a commercial Internet Web site or online service that makes a virtual globe browser available to members of the public shall not provide street view photographs or images of the buildings and facilities described in subdivision (a)."

Anderson argues that he's part of a larger global trend where interests of state are being pressed by domestic politicians worried about the security implications of online mapping. The latest instance came on Tuesday, when the minister of State for Home in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Naseem Khan, said that he wants to stop Google Earth from showing sensitive locations because of terrorism concerns. "We want Google Earth censored," he said. "We shall submit a proposal to the center and other concerned agencies to implement it as soon as possible."

Anderson, who says he is asking only what India and some other foreign governments are demanding for their citizens. I spoke with Anderson late Tuesday to find out why he was so keen to promote the bill.

Question: When is the bill expected to go into committee?
Anderson: I'm thinking that it will be in committee within a week. That's not official. Right now, everything is fluid. The majority party sets the pace but we were told to expect it to happen about a week from now.

Q: Your bill would ban online providers from showing detailed satellite images of schools, places of worship, government buildings, and medical facilities, unless they were first blurred out. How did you arrive at that list?
Anderson: Well, I looked at where we've had security issues in the past and potentially, might have issues in the future. Churches and synagogues have been bombed. So have federal buildings and then, of course, 9/11. So, the threats are out there and as a state legislator, public safety is my No. 1 job. To ignore that fact would be irresponsible.

Q: Still, the wording of the proposed bill is not going to go down well with a lot of people.
Anderson: The bill is fraught with undefined items and it has to be honed down and clarified. What you're looking at is not the finished product. But the concept of the bill will remain. After the Mumbai attacks, the Indian government found that the lone surviving terrorist used Google's online maps and the level of detail it offered made them effective. What's interesting is that what they're doing in India now is exactly what I'm suggesting we do. If you go throughout the world, many countries are trying to shut down Google mapping--it's not just Google. My bill would address all online mapping.

Q: Isn't the real threat here the motivation of people who look to commit heinous acts, rather than the technology they use?
Anderson: I'm not against the technology; it's fantastic. But we're in an evolving world and we have to change our course as it changes. I'm all for online mapping, but knowing where the air ducts are in an air shaft is not necessary for me to navigate in the city. Who wants to know that level of detail? Bad people do.

Q: But could not a terrorist just as easily plan out their attacks by using a map of a city like Mumbai? They don't need to go up online to locate their targets.
Anderson: The level of detail is not on the maps. With a map, you cant count the number of bricks in a building, or see the elevator shafts. With this level of detail (afforded by online maps,) you can. I hear the argument that, "Yeah, I want to also ban cars because cars are used in robberies." Look, cars have other commercial uses. There are no other uses for knowing on a map where there are air shafts. These are all red herring arguments. The fact is that I would be remiss in my job if I didn't take this seriously. I'm not interested in censoring Google or the others, but now that we know there's a threat, how could we not address this?

Q: But that's where it becomes more complicated. A colleague here at CNET pointed out that the way the bill is worded, government agencies that use Google Earth, for instance, to help the public find their buildings could conceivably be in violation as well.
Anderson: The wording of the law would change. But companies would still back off the level of detail. The only concern people have had that's been put to me is whether they'll still be able to use the online maps and my answer is that, absolutely, they will. I'm not against technology.

Q: Do you believe you have the votes to pass your proposal?
Anderson: I'm working on that. And I believe that other people from other states will follow suit and do something similar.

Q: If AB-255 does pass, why do you believe it would stand up to a court challenge?
Anderson: That's their option. They can take it to court. But since when do you have a First Amendment right to yell fire? This falls under the same category.

Q: So have you been in touch with software companies to talk about your bill?
Anderson: Microsoft spent two hours with me last week. I want to hone it down and work out something that works for them as well as for me. I also spoke with the lobbyist from Google. My door is open. I do want to work with them in good faith. The bill will be cleaned up and I have a pretty good idea of where it should go, but as we got through the vetting process, I'm open to what my colleagues have to say or what Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Mapquest have to say. But the concept of the bill will stay intact. This is the trend that's going around the world. let's not wait until an American has to die in order to do the right thing.

On the surface, there's not an immediately apparent link between social-networking software and enterprise computing. But in what it describes as its "biggest launch ever," collaboration software company Jive Software will take a stab with a new suite of social-business applications called Jive SBS 3.0.

The intent is to offer corporate users more ways to tap the knowledge of social connections inside and outside the enterprise. So it is that SBS 3.0 includes a variety of software modules designed to better bridge departments, partners, and customers in a single online community.

Sam Lawrence, the company's chief marketing officer, likened the product to "a very smart extranet--the difference is that this is a productivity app, whereas the extranet was akin to just opening a window."

Increasingly, this is turning into a crowded field where Jive will bump up against Microsoft Sharepoint and IBM's Lotus Connections, among others.

But with this release, which builds on the company's experience with two previous products in this area--Clearspace and Clearspace Community--one analyst said that Jive's platform approach may prove a harbinger, especially in a category that hasn't seen all that much innovation the last few years.

"I expect to see all social platform vendors move in the same direction, especially nowadays given economic realities," Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group, said in an e-mail message. "People looking at these tools need a more solid business case so vendors need to respond with more focused frameworks that target certain business areas, processes and roles. Analytics helps people not only with the metrics they need to substantiate their business case, but to also help them understand what's going on within their communities and networks regarding activity and health."

(Credit: Jive Software)

According to Gotta, clients increasingly complain of so-called point solutions, where there is one vendor for blogs, another for wikis, and so on.

"They are not always convinced that large vendors' platforms are the way to go de facto, though," he wrote. "SharePoint, for instance, has pretty significant weaknesses when it comes to some of the '2.0' tools that will not be addressed until the O14 release. So there's this in-between area for a social platform and that's where Jive is playing, along with Telligent, and several SaaS-based vendors like (Awareness Networks>, HiveLive, and Leverage."

Jive claims to be "the first and only company to connect employees, customers, and partners in a single community." But Gotta believes the challenge in front of Jive will be to provide more complete content management capabilities as well as ways to integrate with other applications.

"How will Jive 'socially enable' other applications?" he asked. "These social platforms will aggregate a lot of information over time. How do you expose and package that insight into a widget, or plug-in, or enable some type of syndication model or REST interface so people can build or integrate this information into their line of business applications. Finally, SharePoint--it's the elephant in the room--Jive will eventually need to have a solid integration and co-existence strategy with SharePoint."

In recent conversations with IBMers, one theme nearly always came up: this is a big company with deeper pockets than any other company in the tech business. The blunt message: recession or no recession, it's only a matter of time before less well endowed rivals buckle.

Marketing spin, to be sure--but also a reflection of the constellation of forces in an increasingly weakened tech industry. And now, CEO Sam Palmisano has made it official.

In a letter to shareholders released in conjunction with IBM's annual report, Palmisano says that the company is "positioned to lead in the era that lies on the other side of the present crisis."

"We will not simply ride out the storm," he said. "Rather we will take a long-term view, and go on offense."

What this means in practice is that the company will attempt to leverage its diversification into areas such as cloud computing and services as a competitive weapon against rivals with weaker benches. IBM also is betting that its big presence overseas will help it better ride out a recession that has led to a slump in IT demand in the United States. About 65 percent of its revenues came from outside the U.S. last year.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Palmisano's letter is his declaration that IBM isn't planning to retrench until the global economy recovers:

Many companies are reacting to the current global downturn by drastically curtailing spending and investment, even in areas that are important to their future. We are taking a different approach. Of course, we must continue to improve our competitiveness. But while we maintain discipline and prudence in the near term, we also maintain the discipline to plan for the future. We're not looking back, we're looking ahead. We're continuing to invest in R&D, in strategic acquisitions, in growth initiatives--and most importantly, during these difficult times, in our people.

In other words, we will not simply ride out the storm. Rather, we will take a long-term view, and go on offense.

Separately, IBM disclosed in a filing that it awarded Palmisano $21 million in salary, bonus, perks, and stock-based awards last year.

The headlines are dreary but parts of the country actually are reporting upticks in demand for IT products and services.

(Credit: CNET News)

I know. Sounds crazy. What with more than a few on Wall Street ready to contemplate ritual hara-kiri as the economy goes from bad to worse, this sounds implausible. But paging through the Federal Reserve's district-by-district review of current economic conditions, a couple of counterintuitive nuggets suggest that there remain pockets of strength. Consider the following:

•  IT companies serving the districts around Kansas City and Minneapolis describe conditions as "stable to up."

The Minneapolis region particularly benefited from what was described as "solid demand" from clients investing in projects in hopes of reducing costs. (That finding should be sweet music to the technology industry as it echoes the arguments made by proponents that a recession is exactly the wrong time to slow down IT investments.)

•  IT activity in the Boston region has dropped but some firms report "strong revenue growth" over 25 percent.

In New England, the area's IT firms--and this includes both software and services companies--were able to hold their selling prices. This came despite pressure from customers for different payment plans (while at the same time, it appears some clients are taking longer to pay).

"While some firms have reduced headcount and frozen wages, others are making selective hires and intend to give raises in the range of 3 percent to 4 percent," according to the report.

I'll let bigger brains than mine figure out what, if any, all this portends. But on a related note, check out this write-up of the Department of Labor's February jobs report by my ZDNet colleague Larry Dignan. Again, the numbers overall were dreadful as the economy lost 651,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.1 percent. But as Larry notes: "The data indicates that there are more computer systems design and consulting services gigs than a year ago. There are also more communications equipment manufacturing jobs than a year ago."

This bears close watching. With billions of dollars in stimulus money set to pour into the clean-tech industry, maybe hope for the proverbial silver lining isn't entirely a pipe dream.