Do read the Government IT Strategy. Much has changed from previous drafts. The big issue ia, however, to turn aspiration into reality. The claimed savings look like those in the Gershon report: impossible to achieve without a change of culture but pedestrian compared to those achievable  once that change has been achieved.

Delivery, not aspiration, is that name of the game.

On Tuesday PITCOM had a meeting on Cloud Computing addressed by Salesforce.com, arguably the biggest and most successful cloud operator. The audience included a number of senior public sector IT figures. I was sat next to a CIO who whispered to me that they had looked at Salesforce.com. They were indeed impressive – but the cost per transaction was well above staying in-house. The issue was to do with marginal costs. The organisation had an efficient, mature operation and no need for change – provided politicians or regulators did not mess them about. The choice might well have been different if they had a new application to organise or outsourcing contracts coming to maturity.

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/when-it-meets-politics/2010/01/g-cloud-or-g-string-turning-as.html

More-over, given that the current plans of BT and Virgin will barely have covered 40% of the UK by 2013/4, it looks as though Cloud Computing will be confined to major conurbations, unless its proponents help pull through the investment necessary to expedite and extend the access their customers need.

Virtualization is being taken up at such a pace that it’s hard to find a metaphor to describe it. “Exploding” has a pieces-coming-apart-at-high-speed vibe, when in fact virtualization’s pieces are all coming together. “Imploding” doesn’t work either. We’ve had maybe five years of fast growth, but now it’s mainstream and ready for the lion’s share of apps. We’ve passed the point where the natural expectation for new servers is that they may be virtualized.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31114_3-10432596-258.html

This year is going to be amazingly full of change in IT. “Ennnh, IT sees a lot of change every year,” you say? Yes, fine and true. But not like this one. Not at this magnitude.

In a recent InfoWorld article by Paul Krill, Vint Cerf, who is a co-designer of the Internet’s TCP/IP standards and widely considered a father of the Internet, spoke about the the need for data portability standards for cloud computing. “There are different clouds from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Google, but a lack of interoperability between them,” Cerf explained at a session of the Churchill Club business and technology organization in Menlo Park, Calif.

Interoperability has not been a huge focus around the quickly emerging cloud computing space. Other than “we support interoperability” statements from the larger cloud computing providers, there is not a detailed plan to be seen. I’ve brought it up several times at cloud user group meetings, with clients, and at vendor briefings, and I often feel like I’m the kid in class who reminds the teacher to assign homework.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/data-interoperability-challenge-cloud-computing-259

Cloud computing won’t have as much value unless we get the data-integration mechanisms right

International Business Machines on Thursday announced the largest-ever enterprise cloud computing venture, with the migration of Panasonic to all of IBM’s LotusLive collaboration services, including e-mail and social networking.

The cloud computing market is expected to grow 28% annually, from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012, IBM ( IBM – news – people ) said, based on various market estimates. IBM has launched 11 cloud computing labs worldwide, most recently in Hong Kong.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/ibm-panasonic-agreement-markets-equities-cloud-computing.html

A day after HP and Microsoft teamed up, competition gets more intense in corporate cloud computing

It’s like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.

Just give me my !%!%! apps, already!

Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.

Cloud-computing platform vendors are going to have to do the same thing, except they don’t have the luxury of waiting.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10422861-16.html

Today’s cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won’t be the case for long. It can’t be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they’re going to move “up the stack” into applications.

IBM will ramp up its cloud computing efforts in the messaging and collaboration market in 2010, focusing on extending the security of on-premises solutions to its LotusLive SAAS offerings. From January through October, IBM launched LotusLive Engage, a broad social networking and collaboration platform; LotusLive Connections, a SAAS version of its social networking suite; and its LotusLive iNotes hosted mail solution. IBM will have more to say on its future cloud computing direction in January at Lotusphere 2010.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/IBM-Preps-For-Cloud-Computing-War-Vs-Google-Microsoft-in-2010-634462/

Customers and industry watchers can expect IBM to accelerate its cloud computing efforts into 2010 and beyond, investing at a rate that is commensurate to a $120 billion cloud computing market, an IBM executive told eWEEK.

Google is seeking acquisitions to help boost its cloud computing strategy. The search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, revealed that he is looking to snap up firms capable of helping Google exit the personal computer era and enter the age of cloud-based apps.

The term cloud computing has become something of a buzzword. It refers to the practice of storing information – such as emails, photos and documents – on web apps that can be connected to at any time, rather than on localised operating systems like Microsoft Windows.

http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/News/MostRead/970605/Download-Smart-guide-to-Cloud-computing/

It is likely to be a few years before cloud computing becomes a mass consumer proposition, but smart brands are already exploring it.

BPM big boys Oracle and IBM face a growing threat in the business process management market – Fujitsu. The Japanese giant today unveiled version 11 of its BPM product Interstage and commenced a free development program designed to take advantage of the growing trend around BPM cloud computing.

The new program is designed for channel, embedded and system integrator partners as well as enterprise development teams. Participants can test drive web-based Interstage BPM with limited risk and without up-front cost. Members have the option to develop and deploy the product for up to ten users free in Fujitsu’s own cloud. Fujitsu competitors like Oracle and IBM do not currently offer web-based, BPM cloud solutions through their own consolidated data centers. Most tap Amazon for the heavy-lifting and SLAs.

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Fujitsu-BPM-Cloud-Challenges-IBM-Oracle-401162/

The new release and corresponding cloud services are focused on expanding its channel through OEM, VARs and systems integrators, company said.

On Wednesday, August 26, the All Points Blog reported on a poll (Take this week’s poll! in the daily newsletter) conducted by Directions Magazine: “Cloud computing is the latest ‘buzz word’ in information technology, but an understanding of what the phrase means remains elusive.” This was based on the results of the survey in which readers picked from a list of choices asking if cloud computing is just another way of describing Web services, SaaS, virtualization or remotely managed services. Readers had two other choices as well: “can’t be defined just yet” and “I don’t know what cloud computing is.”

Another choice should have been offered: “a bit of all the choices,” as cloud computing is not any one of the offered selections. We need a bit more background on cloud computing and what it will mean for the GIS industry because it appears that many of the survey participants, presumably all GIS savvy, did not know what cloud computing is. Yet that All Points Blog post also referenced an InformationWeek article which stated many IT managers are budgeting for cloud computing.

http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=3323

“based on the results of the survey in which readers picked from a list of choices asking if cloud computing is just another way of describing Web services, SaaS, virtualization or remotely managed services. Readers had two other choices as well: “can’t be defined just yet” and “I don’t know what cloud computing is.”

IBM is sinking its teeth deeper into government IT today with a new software framework that joins the company’s expansive middleware portfolio into a neat package for The Man 2.0.

The new IBM Government Industry Framework is designed for government citizen services – a market that covers nearly everything fed except defense and intelligence. (IBM already provides a military-grade software platform that it’s keeping separate for a variety of control and security reasons).

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/30/ibm_government_industry_framework/

Big Blue descends on gov services