Key players have proven there's value in the cloud. But Cloud 2.0 is more about moving the fringe benefits of the cloud to the core of enterprise (and even consumer) applications. The discussions that potential cloud users are having is shifting from technical feasibility to business and economic discussions.

We kicked off day 2 of the STVP/AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford with a keynote from Doug Merritt, EVP at SAP. The message from Doug about cloud computing was clear: Change will be constant, the OnDemand model will continue to perform, this is just the beginning, and SAP will be there for the longhaul. This talk starts off with Tony Perkins' intro for the day and rolls right into Doug's talk.

Aprigo lets mid-market IT pros to tame their organizations' data deluge with a unique, low-cost SaaS offering that provides complete visibility and control of the security and costs of unstructured business data. Aprigo's NINJA is a SaaS solution that provides a unified data dashboard for unstructured data both on-premise and in the cloud. Only Aprigo lets businesses prevent data breaches, pass compliance audits, benchmark their data environments, and save on storage costs within five minutes.

Intuit’s major outage last week served as a harsh, yet valuable reminder for all of us about the serious risks which underlie our growing dependence on third-party, ‘cloud’-based services.The irony about the timing of Intuit’s service failure is that the company has been escalating its marketing efforts to position it as a leading provider of cloud services. For instance, Intuit’s SVP/CTO, Tayloe Stansbury, was a keynote presenter at last month’s SIIA All About the Cloud Conference in San Francisco where he boasted about Intuit surpassing $1 billion in cloud-based service revenues.

It's with great excitement that we introduce the inaugural OnDemand 100. This batch of emerging Internet companies is disrupting the established enterprise and pioneering cloud computing and SaaS.

The overall winner of the “OnDemand 100” is Appirio, a cloud solution provider that offers both products and professional services that help enterprises accelerate their adoption of the cloud.

If you drew a triangle and placed Cisco, Microsoft and VMware, respectively, at each corner you would have a good idea of where the center of power is regarding the future direction of the IT industry and the emergence of cloud computing. And plenty of well-heeled tech companies would love to keep this status quo in tact for as long as possible, simply because they've run out of steam and are counting on complexity and lock-in to postpone the revolution.

I just read the news about Google's upgrades to Google Latitude—and boy is it a bold move with major implications. If done right, I think it could ultimately be as transformative as when Facebook opened up the social graph. Before Facebook opened up their social graph, if a web site wanted to know your relationships/friends it had to ask you. Each and every time. Then came Facebook Connect.