We attended Gartner's recent webinar entitled "Emerging Technology Hype Cycle 2010: What's Hot and What's Not", presented by Jackie Fenn. Gartner's Hype Cycles are considered to be some of the most respected forms of research in the field of technology. Here's a quick overview of some of the points covered during the webinar.

The webinar started off with a quick description of how what a Hype Cycle is all about. To remind you, Hype Cycles are management models that help organizations understand the landscape of technology maturity and markets, and to decide which technology innovations to adopt, postpone or ignore, and when is an appropriate time to adopt. The Gartner Hype Cycle model was first published 15 years ago, and has grown to an annual release of between 70 and 80 Hype Cycles per year.

See the Hype Cycle explained below.

Dries Buytaert of Drupal and Acquia is warning that Software as a Service is becoming a threat to open source and that clouds could create the same vendor lock-in customers sought to avoid with open source.

Even where SaaS companies let customers take back their data, they often don’t let them take the code underlying it, he wrote in a blog post. Data without software is useless.

One of the main open source concerns about SaaS in the past has been that the largest open source outfits, like Google, don’t support true copyleft through the Affero license. Google itself prefers the Apache license to anything copyleft, and this is fast becoming the norm.

Buytaert believes open source companies can disrupt this model through services like his own Drupal Gardens, which allows exporting of codes, themes, and data to any other Drupal hosting environment.

We have seen a significant increase in cloud solution adaption during the financial crises period. Customers / users are now more cautious in evaluating the cloud solutions. In addition to the adaptability, user friendly and scalable criteria, organizations are now more concerned about any third party system's capability in interacting with the existing solutions in the eco-system. Where as the eco-system may have few home grown solutions, standalone applications, third party systems, back office solutions etc.,

Opting a cloud business application affects all the areas of an organization, from sales & marketing, technical, operational and till customer support. An integrated cloud system should ensure that there is no redundancy in data, yet without compromising on its security. So System should have a flexible architecture which ensures integration with external systems and internal systems of the organization. And the overall system should be tightly integrated resulting in enriching the value of their offerings through the synergy of functionality brought together on these platforms.

Though there are good number solution providers aware of this fact, still few of the solutions offered to Cloud Business are not fully geared up in delivering these promises or expectations to their customers.

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