The CloudFutures agenda featured a diverse group of industry pundits and practitioners regarding SaaS/cloud computing market trends; development and delivery best practices; packaging and pricing techniques; storage opportunities and security challenges; and compliance and other legal concerns.

As I recover from this weekend's Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been struck by two thoughts regarding last week’s Dreamforce conference,

• Salesforce.com’s (CRM) new Chatter social computing functionality may be a defensive as well as proactive move.
• An acquisition of Salesforce.com by Oracle (ORCL) may be a friendly maneuver rather than a hostile takeover.

As I reported in my previous blogpost, Salesforce.com’s introduction of Chatter last week at Dreamforce was met with mixed reviews. Many customers, partners, analysts, press and even internal staff and salespeople were uncertain about the company’s goals and capabilities in this new area.

I’ve always been an admirer of the marketing prowess of salesforce.com… although it always drives me crazy to comply with the lower-case spelling of their name because it seems to genericize their value in my eyes.

One of the specific aspects of the company’s marketing tactics which I’ve particularly liked is the way in which it continuously extends its brand identity by incrementally broadening and redefining its functional capabilities. This is a technique which I call “iterative marketing”.

Despite the downturn in the economy, or maybe because of it, this year’s Dreamforce has attracted over 19,000 registrants, up from around 10k a year ago. The opening keynote session was bursting at the seams with people and energy.

I was invited to attend the fifth annual ConnectWise Partner Summit in Orlando this past week and was surprised to discover that it has become one of the premier meeting places for aspiring Managed Service Providers ((MSPs)) and industry enablers.

I was also impressed with the amount of attention ConnectWise’s executives, other event speakers and sponsors, and the conference attendees gave to the convergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), managed services and cloud computing.

One of my favorite events of the year used to be Gartner’s Symposium in Orlando because of the locale and multi-day immersion in IT prognostications.

While I often disagreed with the POV of Gartner’s analysts, I found it useful to hear what they had to say because of their influence over enterprise IT and business decision-makers.

Nearly thirty companies have joined forces to form a new European Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing services business community, called EuroCloud.

The purpose of this new group is to bring together Euro-based SaaS and cloud computing vendors, enablers, integrators and industry experts to share best practices and promote new business opportunities across the continent.

A series of service outages over the past few days has brought into focus all the worst fears about the ‘cloud’ computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement. These incidents have also demonstrated how data center experience doesn’t necessarily translate into cloud computing excellence.

The most damaging outage affected T-Mobile users who lost their contact information in a SideKick server snafu by a Microsoft (MSFT) subsidiary, amazingly called “Danger”.

Monday, Dell and saleforce.com (CRM) announced that Dell will offer salesforce.com’s SaaS solutions to its small- and mid-size business (SMB) customers via its website.

Although Benioff is an alumnus of Oracle (ORCL) and Oracle’s founder/chairman/CEO Larry Ellison was an initial investor in salesforce.com, there has been no love lost between them publicly because salesforce.com was conceived to compete against Oracle’s Siebel division long before it became a part of Oracle.

This move is another indication that CFO receptivity toward SaaS-based accounting, financial management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications is rising.

Dell’s acquisition of Perot Systems clearly demonstrates that Dell (DELL) is in the midst of abandoning its historic advantage as the most efficient direct marketing company in the tech industry, in favor of following the increasingly failed outsourcing models of its bigger hardware rivals.

By buying Perot Systems, Dell is following in the footsteps of HP’s acquisition of EDS in an attempt to match the IT outsourcing (ITO) and services capabilities of IBM (IBM).

In the ongoing tug-of-war between on-premise and on-demand vendors, much was made of Steve Lucas’ jump from the SaaS unit of SAP’s Business Objects to Salesforce.com (CRM) to lead its new Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) initiative a little over a year ago.

With far less fanfare, Lucas returned to SAP last month as its new SVP of Business User Sales for North America. Since Steve is a friend, and SAP and Salesforce.com are also clients, I won’t share any confidential information or insight. However, his move does raise a series of interesting questions about Salesforce.com’s Force.com initiative and SAP’s (SAP) plans.

For everyone in the U.S., Labor Day weekend represents the spiritual end of the summer. It is also a time when many of us sit back and take stock of our lives and the world around us as we prepare to re-enter the regular work routine.

The first thing to be said about the current state of our world is there is nothing routine about it. Obviously, the economy has had a major impact on the business environment and everyone’s psyches as well. But, even if we are fortunate enough to see an uptick in the financial climate as we approach the last quarter of the calendar year, I believe the rapid migration to cloud-based services will continue to accelerate and fundamentally transform the competitive landscape of almost every industry, including the public sector.

One of the most controversial aspects of the rapidly evolving cloud computing market among industry insiders is the idea of ‘private clouds’.

Purists insist that cloud computing is all about exchanging legacy, on-premise, inhouse IT resources and functions with online, shared resources via the Internet (i.e., the ‘cloud’).

A combination of work, travel and summertime distractions have prevented me from commenting on a series of small, yet significant announcements and activities over the past couple of weeks in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing market.

My latest travels started last week at Pacific Crest’s 11th Annual Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, CO, where I met with a series of the investment firm’s ‘buy-side’ clients as a part of its Mosaic program, and interacted with a variety of cloud computing executives and VCs in a SaaS workshop.

Please note the postscript added at the end of the article on August 6, 2009

Making the transition to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model isn’t easy for incumbent software vendors (ISVs).

Yesterday’s announcement that NetSuite (N) is acquiring QuickArrow and merging it with OpenAir is the most recent example of a consolidation process in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry which I predicted would accelerate at the beginning of the year.

This particular transaction is very similar to Xactly’s acquisition of Centive in January. Rather than combining functional capabilities to create a more robust solution, the companies are combining forces to create greater scale.

Last week, Gartner attempted to derail the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement by issuing a press release regarding its latest customer survey which found that SaaS users are

underwhelmed by their current experience of it and sense that SaaS is not quite the panacea it often promised to be.

Much has been written regarding Google’s latest challenge to Microsoft–its announcement last week that it plans to unveil a new operating system (OS) in the second half of 2010.

There is no question that Google’s (GOOG) ambitious plans can have a significant impact on the computing world. And, because computing has become an integral part of everyone’s day-to-day world, the Google-Microsoft (MSFT) war deserves plenty of attention, even in the mainstream media and among Main Street businesses.