A Salesforce.com executive has stated that cloud computing users are expecting more and more from the applications they employ.

Parker Harris, executive vice president of Salesforce.com, said that one decade ago, the goal was to come up with business services that had the same simple level of usability as Amazon, reports PC Mag.

He said expectations have shifted over the course of time, with users wanting features such as connections to other services and social media functions as part of their cloud computing offering.

There is also often a requirement from clients to have the technology linked up to mobile devices, it was suggested.

Earlier this month, new Salesforce.com application Chatter was examined by Adam Honig on the CRM Insights website.

He stated that document and data changes can be easily tracked on the service, allowing users to keep on top of business opportunities, contact detail changes or account alterations, reported MarketingProfs.

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Novell and Tencent, reportedly China's biggest Internet service portal, have set up a research lab in Shenzhen, China, to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform.

Tencent, which is supposed to have 480 million active users and 568.6 million IM accounts, is going to use SUSE Linux and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system.

It's also suppose to use Novell's intelligent workload management solutions, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create an IDC cloud platform that users can use to build, purchase and run business apps. IDC vendors typically lease resources from solution providers and resell them.

Interesting post found on Linkedin awhile back - I’m curious as to how people feel about it, and if anyone has used any other compensation mechanisms that either worked or didn’t, so please chime in!

On many occasions, I’ve heard people discuss the issues regarding compensation strategy for a SaaS sales team. The one thing I rarely hear, however, is either how folks are dealing with it in the real world or proposals/frameworks that attempt to solve many of the sales compensation problems. My goal with this post is to provide a “rough draft” framework for compensation and to provide a sounding board for SaaS Blogs readers so we can use our collective brains to discuss potential solutions. Before jumping into the post, let’s recap the issues with compensating your SaaS sales team:

1. Tradition - Sales teams are accustomed to large commissions associated with the large license fees tacked on to on-premise software. This creates significant incentive to sell, sell, sell! SaaS, however, takes an “amortized approach” to the traditional lump sum revenue. This puts the company in a position where giving a life time value or term value commission is at odds with the companies sales position since the funds from the sale have not been realized and/or collected at the time of commission payout. This can cause negative cash flow, force underfunding of growth initiatives, and a slew of other issues.
2. Disincentivization via Annuities - If an ISV decides to avoid the cash-flow problems associated with the paying out of commission on contract or lifetime value, they generally try to do so via an annuity approach to commission. Although this aligns with the corporate revenue cycle and cash position, it tends to do a poor job at providing incentive. Furthermore, a successful sales person may focus strictly on account management of existing clients since commission is paid out in annuities and keeping existing customers happy (and collecting the ongoing annuity payment) is easier than landing new customers.
3. New Job Role - Unless your organization separates the function of account manager from sales, odds are your sales people will also serve as account managers, which might be a new concept to your sales folks but also justifies continuing to payout commissions even after discrete sale events. Sales teams are responsible for keeping your existing customers happy since, as an ISV, you must now provide them recurring value for their recurring money, and part of that value comes from their relationship with you.

We can definitely find many more issues to deal with, but tackling just this set is challenge enough. An idea I’ve been tossing around is assigning “age” to generated SaaS revenue, where a salesperson receives the highest % commission at the beginning of a contract and that as the revenue stream becomes older, the % commission drops.

AudioBox.fm, the cloud-based music service that lets users upload their music collection and access it anywhere, has added the iPhone/iPod touch to its list of supported devices through a native application.

Previously, iPhone users could only access AudioBox via Mobile Safari, a bit of a kludge since the QuickTime Player plugin effectively takes over the phone’s browser. There’s also existing support for Android, a nifty HTML5-based browser version and a Windows desktop app, with the Italy-based company touting itself as an open platform to store a user’s media library in the cloud, giving them “access to uploaded media from anywhere through the highest number of devices possible.”

Of course, with Apple’s expected launch of its own cloud-based music offering based on the company’s purchase of Lala, AudioBox is just as well to emphasize ‘open’ and multi-platform support. On that note, I’m told that the company wasn’t even entirely sure if its iPhone app would be approved by Apple for sale in the iTunes App Store to the extent that it delayed developing advanced features such as ‘offline’ playlists in case it turned out to be a waste of time.

As it stands, the iPhone app supports streaming of a user’s music library over WiFi and 3G, multitasking/background support thanks to iOS 4, and unlike AudioBox’s Android app, playback can start and resume from any point in a track.

Rackspace's OpenStack could signal a new race to open up cloud computing technology

Rackspace's recent OpenStack announcement is a strong, if familiar, open source play. Given Rackspace's place in the market, open-sourcing its cloud code provides strong differentiation from Amazon, which has become the de facto standard for storage and compute services in the cloud.

And with NASA contributing the code that runs its own Nebula cloud platform, OpenStack has the potential to capture the increased "rate of innovation" that can result from open-sourcing its code.

Make sure your IT budget priorities match up with the current business focus on growth. Here, Forrester Research shares six tips for changing the infrastructure and operations portion of your IT budget to support business expansion.

After a year of deep recession affecting IT budgets, businesses are finally returning to a growth agenda. And infrastructure and operations is no exception: in the coming year, Forrester expects a noticeable bump in IT spend. So what does this mean for the infrastructure professional? It's time to re-prioritize initiatives to align with the business' focus on growth. To do so, look at where your dollars are coming from, tap into funds set aside for innovation and growth, and deliver on three critical I&O initiatives.

Infrastructure and operations has always been one of the largest IT functions, so it's no surprise that it can consume up to 50% of the overall IT budget. When asked about spending plans, IT decision-makers told us the I&O budget breaks down into three nearly equal sized buckets. 16% is dedicated to staff, 19% to servers, storage and desktop assets, and 14% maintains the local-area and wide-area networks.

But 2010 will not be business as usual. When asked to categorize the IT spend breakdown, we found that only half of the funds are going to ongoing operations and maintenance. "Keeping the lights on" is taking a backseat while new IT initiatives and expansions move forward, utilizing the other half of IT spend.

Original article by: Neil Perkin

Countless blog posts have been written about digital community practice, usually containing words like 'open' and 'transparent', and phrases like 'be human'. But what does it all really mean, in practical terms? Here are 10 key principles:

1. The community should have a purpose

   A community without a purpose is not a community. Purpose gives people a reason to be there, provides common ground, motivation, and helps them to connect with likeminded people. And it's not necessarily what you assume it to be. When asked about how you build a digital community, Mark Zuckerberg famously answered that that was the wrong question: "Communities already exist. Instead, think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do."

Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an IC doubles every two years or so, is a commonly used measure of the rapid development of computer technology.

The storage industry, however, long ago transcended Moore’s Law, with new hardware components, systems, software and services being developed at a pace unmatched in any industry. Hard drives with capacities of 3TBs? Storage appliances that can scale capacity to infinity? Good old-fashioned -- and cheap -- IP networks replacing high-speed Fibre Channel and InfiniBand? Things that would have seemed impossible five years ago are now commonplace. None of this would have been possible without the early realization that the cost of raw storage capacity would start approaching free, and the vision that new ways to store, back up, retrieve, archive and, above all, manage users’ and companies’ data would be required.

Enter the storage visionaries. This group of talented individuals -- some of the smartest people on the planet -- live and breathe storage. They protect, nurture and grow the storage on which business, academia, industry and entertainment thrive.

These storage visionaries -- these Storage Superstars -- are an eclectic lot of individuals. They include people like NetApp’s Julie Parrish or EMC (NYSE:EMC)’s Gregg Ambulos, who are in customers’ and partners’ faces every day loudly driving and promoting their companies’ visions. Or people like NetApp’s James Lau, who are so shy that just getting a photograph can be a difficult task.

They include the technology developers of brash, young companies like Coraid and Pivot3 with bold new ideas about how to manage storage. Or folks like Holly Frost at Texas Memory Systems, a guy who has been working on SSD technology for 30 years at the company he founded. CRN shines a light on these Storage Superstars. Some were easy to find, while others may not have seen sunlight for years. 2010 Storage Superstars

Gregg Ambulos Vice President, Americas Channel Sales, EMC (NYSE:EMC)