Nemertes Impact Analysis

The Impact Analysis is a weekly quick-take on breaking IT news.
Nemertes provides expert insight on how recent IT news affects you.

IBM's Walk in the Cloud 

IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced its expansion of cloud-computing services,
highlighting its Bluehouse social-networking and collaboration offering. The
vendor will deliver the hosted collaborative services (now in beta),
incorporating technology from Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Sametime
IM.

Nearly one in five participants in Nemertes' Service-Oriented
Architectures and Applications benchmark use service-delivered collaboration
tools, conferencing, and general-purpose portals. They cite the pay-as-you-go
nature of software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a key attraction, as well as the
associated shifting of IT's parts of implementation, maintenance, and scaling to
service providers.

Impacts:

Enterprises: Organizations, especially those with limited IT resources,
should consider housing applications "in the cloud," enabling quick
implementation and low maintenance.

Vendors: Offerings like this will be attractive to your partners. Unlike
one-time licensing fees, SaaS offers resellers a way to generate a recurring
revenue stream.

Investors: As vendors such as IBM and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) invest in cloud
computing, watch for new partnerships between independent software vendors
(ISVs) and infrastructure service providers, such as Rackspace Hosting Inc.
(NYSE: RAX), and Terremark (NASDAQ:TMRK).

Katherine Trost, Research Analyst

http://www.nemertes.com/benchmarks/unified_communications_and_collaboration

http://www.crn.com/software/210605696