Focus.com released this infographic after last week's media spectacle surrounding Marc's presentation at the Oracle OpenWorld event.

The short of the story, if you missed it, is that Marc's talk was cancelled for no good reason. Salesforce.com reportedly paid Oracle $1M for the talk -- it was refunded. Mac and Larry have battled for years, but were once colleagues. Larry made an angel investment in Salesforce.com

SAP AG must pay $1.3 billion to rival Oracle Corp. for copyright infringement, a federal jury ruled Tuesday, following a high-profile court battle between the business-software makers.

A jury's verdict that SAP must pay Oracle Corp. $1.3 billion over stolen intellectual property looks certain to be appealed, says Jeanette Borzo, who covered the case for Dow Jones Newswires. Interview with Stacey Delo.

The eight-person jury reached the verdict a day after it adjourned to deliberate. The companies presented closing arguments Monday in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif.

OpenWorld Hewlett-Packard and Oracle have sidestepped their feud over disgraced CEO Mark Hurd on the opening of the database giant's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

HP enterprise business executive vice president Ann Livermore opened OpenWorld in a Sunday evening keynote that emphasized how much business her company performs with Oracle.

HP's storage, servers, software and services chief listed the facts just after having been introduced on stage by Oracle president and chief financial officer Safra Catz.

Psst! Mister. You wanna buy some cloud? Cloud computing that is. It is the wave of the future in the delivery of everything from computer software to media products to computer services. Market researcher The 451 Group estimates that revenue for infrastructure as a service, one of the two big categories of cloud computing will grow to $1.2 billion a year by 2013 from $200 million last year. Data storage in the cloud, the other big cloud computing segment, will see revenue climb to $1.7 billion in 2013 from $150 million in 2009, the group estimates.

Even Microsoft (MSFT) in its current update to its cash cow Office 2010 software is taking steps toward the day when most people will buy most of the software they need over the Internet as a service that’s resident on big server farms scattered around the world.

But as survivors of the telecom boom (and bust), the dot.com boom (and bust) and, going even further back, the disk drive boom (and bust) know, the future waves in technology can leave investors drowning in a sea of red ink.

Software as a Service (SaaS) presents a classic “disruptive innovation.” Of course, in 2010 that’s not new news.

What is remarkable is how closely the SaaS market’s evolution matches the definition of a disruptive technology that was described by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma (he later replaced the term with “disruptive innovation” in his subsequent book, The Innovator’s Solution). In fact, the SaaS dilemma that incumbent software vendors currently face is playing out almost page-for-page from Christensen’s books. As a result, we can use the disruptive innovation framework to gain insight into what’s to come in enterprise software.

After a decade of deriding SaaS technology as too simple, functionally incomplete and insecure, vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and thousands of incumbent “on-premise” software vendors are now embracing SaaS. It’s an awkward embrace – one that threatens to cannibalize existing revenue steams, divert resources and eat up profits.

Of course, the innovator’s dilemma doesn’t destroy every incumbent. These incumbent market leaders are powerful, resilient innovators themselves. But for armchair quarterbacks like us, this the next five years will present a fascinating game to watch.

I ran across an informative article from Appirio ( www.appirio.com) - a cloud solution provider, predicting that innovation from cloud ecosystems next year will remove many of the remaining barriers to enterprise adoption of cloud. With so many clear demonstrations of business cases from 2009 (Avon, Japan Post, Starbucks) Appirio believes that the success of the cloud will continue its course to become mainstream in 2010, here's why-

Appirio’s 2010 predictions include:

1. Cloud developer community grows faster than open-source. Today's vendor-specific developer communities will be complemented by a community dedicated to the general discipline of building applications on the cloud, disrupting existing on-premise developer communities. The combination will launch a new generation of 'cloud developers.'
2. Cloud standards won't (and shouldn't) happen. The pace of innovation is so rapid in the cloud that the emergence of truly open cloud standards won't yet be possible, except at the lowest levels of infrastructure. Traditional vendors will attempt to muddy the waters across layers and claim the 'standards high ground' with efforts like the Open Cloud Manifesto.
3. Cloud providers tackle lock-in. Platform lock-in remains one of the major concerns keeping CIOs from building applications on PaaS. In 2010 we expect to see major initiatives from cloud providers to overcome this objection, either revolutionary (e.g., Force.com supporting other languages) or evolutionary (e.g., application migration frameworks or platform 'porting' toolkits.)
4. Cloud integration will get an enterprise poster-child. Boomi and Cast Iron have had a fantastic 2009 and we expect one will land a major enterprise customer in 2010 that replaces on-premise integration technology with a cloud-based alternative.
5. Enterprise apps get Googled. Google's investments in its cloud platform will transform Google Apps from a simple Exchange/Sharepoint replacement into a legitimate front end for enterprise applications (e.g., Google Web Toolkit, Secure Data Connector, and the Google Gadget Framework.)
6. Enterprise collaboration is a feature, not a business. Salesforce Chatter and Google Wave have shown the value of real-time collaboration that is seamlessly integrated with business applications. Standalone enterprise collaboration offerings will have difficulty competing.
7. Microsoft lets Azure cannibalize a global account. Microsoft has shown that it's serious about Azure at this year's Professional Developers Conference. We predict that Azure will cannibalize Microsoft's on-premise footprint at a global account.
8. Cloud computing consolidation. With 2000+ providers, the cloud ecosystem is ripe for consolidation. Salesforce.com and Google are likely to continue with point acquisitions, but they won't be alone. Having missed the first wave of innovation in cloud computing (and lacking any other on-premise technology to acquire) we expect Oracle to buy into the industry that Larry Ellison has dismissed as 'water vapor.' Maybe they'll finally snap up NetSuite.
9. Global Systems Integrators will do nothing more than cloud marketing. The most innovative thing we expect from Accenture next year is a replacement for its Tiger Woods ad campaign.
10. The real innovation will be in the business of cloud computing, not the technology. Cloud providers will become dramatically easier to do business with (e.g., Amazon Spot Markets) and new business models will emerge to make the cloud more consumable (e.g., cloud insurance providers, cloud security auditors, cloud brokerages.)