David Treadwell moves up the stack as Microsoft releases Live Framework to the developer community. With Mesh now clear as a fundamental glue and signaling layer within Azure services, Treadwell, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Live Platform Services, tells TechCrunchIT that though Microsoft is focusing on developers at its Professional Developers event, the next big phase is to integrate the next version of Windows Live with Mesh infrastructure.

This is a classic old guard meets new guard moment, where Microsoft officials try and compartmentalize a massive disruptive wave along traditional group lines. As we hear from Office Enterprise’s Chris Bryant in another PDC video, the company is readying a technology preview of lightweight Office online applications.

Watch as Bryant tiptoes through the minefield between the old Office jargon and the new talking points of the Azure direction: “We’re recognizing the company strategy of basically enabling connected productivity across the PC, the phone, and the browser. In order for customers to participate with each other in connected productivity scenarios, we have to reach out to the endpoints that they use on a regular basis.”

It’s the classic What Customers Are Asking Us For mantra. “We don’t look at it as feature parity between the Web applications and the desktop applications, because the scenarios that people will use the Web for are different scenarios. It isn’t about taking the entire feature set of Word and putting them on the Web.” The tension barely beneath the surface is between providing advanced features of Office on demand and the impact on Office’s revenue stream of a cannibalized Silverlight version.

Both officials say it’s very early, with Treadwell describing Mesh and Office integration as being in an experimental phase. But with the Office invite only preview coming later this year (it’s November, guys) and Mesh now opening up to third party developers through the Live Framework, reading between the lines has already started to be productive, especially if you’re on one of the one in four machines running Silverlight.

Three years to the day from his corner-turn memo about changing Microsoft’s direction from software to software plus services and after two days of keynotes, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie reviewed the launch of the Windows Azure cloud OS and forthcoming online versions of the Office suite.

Ozzie: It’s fun that it’s all coming together. It was Mary Jo [Foley] yesterday who pointed out that today is three years to the day that I wrote that initial Services memo – the disruptions thing.

Gillmor: The San Francisco thing…

Ozzie: Right, what a disaster that was… When there’s no Internet access when we’re trying to show how the company’s going live…

Gillmor: Obviously, it’s a bit of jujitsu to get to the Web with Office.

Ozzie: The the way that they’ve done it.. a few years ago when they were in the planning phase of this next wave, it was basically, what approach should we take? Should we race to the finish line and have something that was complementary with the base Office or should we do it in a way that guarantees compatibility so that we could implement things and have the same back end so that the same file formats would be … it would have their full richness and so on? And that’s the route they went and I think for the customer it’ going to end up being the right route. If you happen to be at a kiosk or wherever, you can use the document where it happens to be stored,and people who are using the PCs will not have any clue that you used whatever – it will just work.

Gillmor: So basically you buy Office and you get all the licenses?

[Frank Shaw interjected: We've not talked about pricing and licensing. For consumers, one way to access would be the Office Live workspaces and they'd be free or ad supported.]

Ozzie: But you could assume that we want to offer enterprise users the power of choice in the way that they do these things, and even though we’re not talking about specifically about the licensing..

Gillmor: You’ll find a way for that to happen…

Ozzie: Yeah.

Gillmor: The BBC demo was astounding I thought.

Ozzie: It was neat because they were using Mesh to replicate their content down to the devices. It was great.

Gillmor: You know my Twitter mania, It was interesting that hey talked about activity streams. They seem to be looking at a relationship with users, where they insert themselves as a kind of dynamic portal. Does that ring any bells for you?

Ozzie: It rings bells in a few ways. I think everyone has, whether it’s Facebook feeds or Twitter or Groove alerts or whatever, I think we’ve all come to the realization that you need to give the user tools to tune the way that they would like to be notified of different activities that are out there that they’re interested in, and you need to give people the ability to both feed many things and collect from many things.

I don’t know that the world is going to unify on one; it doesn’t seem to be heading in that direction – one aggregator…

Gillmor: It didn’t happen with email.

Ozzie: That’s right. It didn’t with email, although it’s weird. I didn’t know how instant messaging was going to pan out, but it never really broke out of the walled garden.

Gillmor: Some people, including me, think public IM like Twitter will become an aggregation point for all of these things.

Ozzie: Could very well be. It will be interesting to see how it pans out. for them. I have not followed that in months so I don’t know if they have begun to address some of the architectural issues. Or if there are proposals to use XMPP type technologies.

Gillmor: XMPP seems to be becoming a greenfield. I heard from a Microsoft business partner that he’s using Silverlight not so much for its video capabilities but as a callback mechanism to keep the website in sync with the servers in the cloud.

Ozzie: That’s interesting.

Gillmor: That seems to be the kind of service fabric you’ve been announcing for the last couple of days.

Ozzie: Yes, there are many ways that these things can be mixed and matched. That’s why this conference and this audience are such a good group. For Microsoft this has the highest dynamics of any ecosystem related to our technologies. The open source community has its own people who are always at the forefront pushing, trying to mix this with that and see where it goes. I’m pretty excited that at least it’s out there now and probably over the next six months or so we’ll see how people are recombining it.

Gillmor: Back to Office for a second. The online version seems to be some part SIlverlight, some downlevel browser.

Ozzie: Yes, they’ve used Silverlight strategically. I don’t know what it will be like when they ship, but wherever they use Silverlight, they also have an Ajax version, but they prefer to use the SIlverlight version because it’s richer. It’s especially richer when you’re syndicating a presentation online, the way it renders text and so on.

Gillmor: And of course for me, it works on the Mac.

Ozzie: Yes, it does work on the Mac. We’ll get you to switch. There’s a whole new movement of switchers.

Gillmor: Oh really? Where did you hear that?

Ozzie: I don’t know, I made it up. I thought you could start it.

The thing that’s fun for me about what you’ve seen in the last couple of days is that you can get a sense for what it’s like if a company of this scale actually is all working in a productive way toward a common vision. When people are working in many different directions, there’s no real opportunity to notice what the heck people are doing. But once you can kind of weave them together, they’ll make the connection from that thing to that thing and so on. It’s nice to see it coming together, both from the user experience and the back end. What’s your take? I don’t expect you to be totally sold on it, but it’s a little different probably from some of the things you’ve been seeing.

Gillmor: Well, at some point the Mesh and Live services cross over and really obviate the differences at the hardware level. It becomes a kind of uber operating system for the Web. As long as you keep this open, people will be able to compete against this, but they won’t be able to stop it.

Ozzie: The way I approach things is a little bit different, perhaps a little bit difficult to explain. I actually think we should be comfortable in our own skin in terms of the position that we’re in, and not be afraid of the openness. And as long as we do the really good things and expose them in ways that people can hook into it, great things will happen.

Steve Gillmor is at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles where he caught Microsoft senior exec Bob Muglia on camera for an interview that touches upon Microsoft’s new cloud initiatives, how it relates to its existing server business, Silverlight, and what Microsoft is like without Bill Gates around every day. Muglia is the senior vice president in charge of the server and tools business, which was responsible for $3.4 billion in revenues last quarter alone. Here’s what he had to say:

Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia, and Amitabh Srivastava participated in an informal blogger roundtable this afternoon at Microsoft’s Professional Developer conference. Although the morning keynote focused on Windows Azure’s infrastructure, Ozzie delved briefly into some of tomorrow’s announcements, implying that there might be surprises in the area of Office applications deployed on top of Azure. Srivastava confirmed that one of the demos featured a glimpse of an online version of Microsoft Word.

Muglia and Ozzie reminisced briefly of problems in Hailstorm that still aren’t solved with Azure. Muglia credited Identity architect Kim Cameron with important work in identity federation that is just now seeing the light of day in Azure’s automated identity provisioning. And Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said sometimes people can get really enamored, overengineering the platform for the platform’s sake. He suggested apps developed during Azure’s community preview release beta will be much more important in driving the cloud platform forward.

Ozzie is actually encouraged that Amazon is in the game, saying he doesn’t know what competitors will do. But as a competitor of Microsoft before his current job, he notes: “The moment that Exchange was launched, Notes took off. The moment we can reasonably port apps from one platform to another, this will take off. Is the web the place to do it? Is the PC the way to do it? Is the phone the way to do it? Ozzie says “Yes!”

Microsoft and Ray Ozzie cracked the door half open this morning on Windows Azure, the infrastructure formerly known as Windows Cloud. In the process, Ozzie served notice that IT will remain in the Windows/Office grip but with an abstraction layer that blurs the on-premise and on-demand worlds.

The outlines of Live Mesh’s role as arbiter of this abstraction were there to be inferred, but the details of how the Azure service bus arbitrates things like federated identity, workflow services, and overall services management will be left to Tuesday’s keynote. But the leisure with which Ozzie and his lieutenants roll out the announcements belies the speed with which Microsoft is executing this corner turn.

It’s called a community technology preview as a nod to the coveted developer crowd, with code distributed along with a freeze on cost that will likely last well into 2009. While that’s standard operating procedure for most platforms in this beta-is-rtm world, the inclusion of Dynamics CRM apps hosted in the cloud is at a minimum a shot across Salesforce’s bow.

A smidgen of Silverlight messaging glinted around the edges of the demos – colorful graphics and a cloud data-based auto-generated chart that popped up on Sharepoint Online. Where once Office Online seemed a pathetic attempt to escape the Office political vortex, now it’s starting to look more like an aggressive strategy to lock IT in and let IT manage users. The bet appears to be that offloading enough infrastructure costs from the enterprise will let Microsoft siphon services revenue as a condition of rapid transformation to more efficient cloud services.

We’ll need to wait for more details to decide how competitive the cloud play is, but Ozzie telegraphed one potential outcome when he thanked Amazon for pioneering the space with its cloud offerings. It certainly was sincere, but there was no mistaking the virtual gold watch, the famous proffered hearty handclasp, and the well-oiled “We’ll take it from here.”

Microsoft wants in on cloud computing. At the company’s Professional Developer’s Conference today, Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, its “internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers.” Windows Azure will only be open as a technology preview to a very limited number of developers for now, and no pricing details have been revealed that I can find. But this is basically Microsoft’s answer to Amazon’s Web Services and cloud computing initiatives from other enterprise IT players, including everyone from IBM to RackSpace.

Azure will run Windows servers and the .Net framework in the cloud as a hosted, pay-as-you go service. It will be part of what Microsoft is calling Live Services, and it will run Live apps, .Net apps, SQL server, Sharepoint servers, and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM. No wonder Amazon added support for Windows servers and SQL servers to EC2 just last week.

Here is how Microsoft is describing Azure:

The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications that span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios and includes a cloud operating system and a set of developer services. Fully interoperable through the support of industry standards and web protocols such as REST and SOAP, you can use the Azure services individually or together, either to build new applications or to extend existing ones

If computing is truly going to the cloud (and it is), Microsoft needs to be there as well. But this is not an agnostic cloud. Azure appears to be geared to run those apps already tuned to run on Microsoft software or written in Visual Studio. But what if an IT manager wants to port apps running on Linux in his data center? Don’t be surprised if Azure offers tools to “transition” those apps to a Microsoft’s environment (albeit, a hosted one). At least there seems to be a commitment to support a wide range of open-source development tools, and to make data importable and exportable via many different protocols such as HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

The battle for the clouds has just begun.

Update: Here is Steve Gillmor’s take.

(Photo by Nicholas T.).

There’s a quickening in the air as some big players come to the table with broad initiatives. Last night at Neil Young’s Bridge concert, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff came back from a trip to Young’s dressing room and murmured something to the effect that something amazing was about to happen. He was right: Young’s set climaxed with a stunning version of the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. Easily the best live version of arguably the pinnacle of the Beatle arc, the performance caught the audience by surprise and then repeatedly topped that with waves of power, cacophony, strange beauty, and a fearless reveling in the opportunity of the near future.

Earlier, Benioff did his usual priming of the pump about Salesforce’ Dreamforce developer conference next week in San Francisco. I’d been tipped by his PR team that something interesting was up, but Marc is famously very careful these days about letting cats out of the bag. What he would say, however, seemed coincident and at the same time resonant with the Neil Young performance: namely, that whatever will be announced is a new direction for Salesforce, something that may surprise, something that though unexpected might harness the power of the disruptive intersection of unanticipated combinations.

Perhaps I’m reading into this, but then we’ve earned the right to dream a little in this unnerving time of collapse and chaos. Tomorrow Ray Ozzie takes the stage in Los Angeles to flesh out the scope and design of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and I for one am looking forward to it. It may not be popular to cheer Microsoft on; as Benioff suggests, Redmond is still the big dog in the technology industry. Salesforce may align more naturally with Google, Amazon, and others, but without a strong Microsoft to promote and tilt against, you get the sense Benioff, Schmidt, Ellison, and the rest would have to invent someone else.

I think something different, that today’s competitive landscape requires a strong Microsoft, a real power in its strategy, not just the old paranoia about lock in and the Windows/Office tax. In a world of Novell and Netscape and Lotus, sure – Microsoft’s control of the desktop meant annihilation. In a world of Google, Cisco, Oracle, and a growing coalition of cloud vendors led by Amazon, there is no clear cataclysmic victory to contemplate. Apple alone makes clear the reality that there’s a market not just for momentum but excellence, and in a tortured economy, excellence will win its share.

That’s the key to what Ozzie will unveil, just how open the platform is to developer investment in its primitives. What little we know so far says a lot – Silverlight built on a three-legged stool of Windows, OS/X, and Linux, Mesh a signaling layer to abstract the new uber-platform from desktop to desktop+ Web, and tooling to orchestrate a new behavioral people-oriented search model as the economic underpinning.

The one thing Microsoft no longer has: the ability to stop the flow of other bits across the network. Sun fought for years to push Java onto the desktop. Adobe came in the back way with animation. Cisco rules at the deep packet layer. And Google and Apple control the imagination layer. So what do they, or we, have to fear from Microsoft? Start with the weakest and work out from there.

Adobe’s Flash bits gateway is seemingly the most vulnerable. Forget Silverlight – the real battleground is the mobile space, where Apple is maintaining a blockade that will be difficult to dislodge given the iPhone’s still-growing success. Android may help, but Google has more juice in its control of a mobile productivity suite via the iPhone + Android to risk Steve Jobs’ wrath. And Chrome on Android with Chrome technology baked into Safari, Firefox, and even a Mesh-enabled IE creates a bit pump that makes Adobe look like a third world country.

The religious arguments against all this will certainly have some effect, with anti-Microsoft rhetoric making it difficult for developers to stick their toes in the water. But with layoffs mounting and startup money moving toward credible revenue, Microsoft’s control of IT spending will keep developers in place as virtualization slipstreams the new platform in under cover of security and governance requirements. Microsoft in effect becomes IT’s bulwark against the ongoing encroachment of on-demand outsourcing – read Salesforce, Oracle, and likely Amazon as they move into applications.

It’s almost as though Microsoft has waited long enough for this economic meltdown to let market triage do its heavy lifting for them. But no matter how vulnerable elements of the anti-Microsoft coalition may be, individual collapses are unlikely to disrupt the march to at least two credible bit pump platforms – and whoever has unrestricted access to the Net has an equal chance of capturing behavior and therefore the efficiency of realtime relevance. With that comes a major stake in the new media restructuring, where the old three network pattern reemerges with Google, Microsoft, and Apple as the new ABC, CBS, and NBC.

It may not play out this way, but I don’t mind being called out as a Hippie for Obama or one who’s rooting for Microsoft to pull this off. I’ve been rooting for Google all along, and Salesforce and Amazon too. I wouldn’t have bet on what Neil Young and his band pulled off last night, but he and they, and we, did. I read the news today, oh boy.

Thursday night Twitter engineer Alex Payne finally acknowledged the obvious regarding the firehose – the full stream of data sought after by third-party developers to add back the long-withheld Track service. Twitter executives have been all over the map on this, sending developers on a wild goose chase to obtain access to the XMPP stream that the company has failed to provide since May.

Payne’s post describes how Twitter provided the firehose “on an experimental basis some months ago, but had to limit its distribution to just a few subscribers while we worked on technical hurdles.” At BearHug Camp, developers were told to contact Gnip as an intermediary, but now Payne says Twitter has decided to keep the service in-house with a newly-staffed team and yet another undetermined delta between promise and reality.

Friendfeed’s realtime beta service and promised improvements in auto-provisioning of Friend Lists may have done more than all the BearHugging and developer consternation combined to smoke Twitter out. While Twitter tap dances and stonewalls, Friendfeed releases a steady stream of features that, in aggregate, add up to a whole lot more than promises and lipstick back-pedaling. Today, for example, Friendfeed Rooms were transformed into a comment management system:

Room admins can also now choose whether they want comment moderation on their semi-public rooms. This can be particularly useful if you want to embed your room on your own web site. When commenting in a moderated room, a user will see “Pending” before their unapproved comment, and will also have the option of editing or deleting the comment without needing to wait for an admin to approve or reject it. Room admins will see the approval-pending comments at the top of that room and also in the entries themselves.

This leverages the new realtime features as well as the embeddable widget option to receive such a room feed. It also solves one of Friendfeed’s most fundamental problems, namely the siloing of the comment stream. Not only can rooms be used to aggregate comments, the widget lets you spread the comments around in context of blogs, portals, and other social networks. In one fell swoop, Disqus, coComment, and even other aggregation points such as Microsoft Sharepoint become objects looking smaller than real size in the rear view mirror.

Friendfeed becomes a conversation hub that can be threaded through Twitter and other micromessaging platforms at the cost of a tinyurl. What we’re seeing here are the primitives needed to assemble conversational routing at the micromessage level, something that is more valuable to Twitter users than the limited realtime tools available from the Mother Ship. Friendfeed is in a real conversation with its developers, in contrast to the snipe hunt Twitter keeps sending its developers on, only to admit they are really just buying time until they can figure out how to keep the ideas in-house.

Twitter’s bigger problem is that Track is a commodity once Twitter finally releases it. Regardless of its cost to users – which will likely be subsidized by advertising models – the benefits of tracking a notification service for valuable conversations held and managed by users on a competitive network are also commoditized. The longer Twitter waits to get into the game, the more valuable Friendfeed rooms and conversation streams become and the more opportunity for Friendfeed to release its own Track.

Friend List modeling will then become the analog to Twitter Follows, and Rooms a way of aggregating discovery of new friends. Track across both spaces with realtime output and API messaging back out to Twitter will be hard to compete against, especially when Friendfeed is using Twitter as its viral marketing tool. And history is telling us the only thing likely to get Twitter moving is competition. That they now have in spades.

Cloud computing keeps advancing like rolling thunder. Amazon today announced a major upgrade to its EC2 compute cloud service and Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim has decided to spend more time at his startup Arista Networks, which sells 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at handling the loads at cloud-computing data centers. And just yesterday, RackSpace announced two small acquisitions to help it better compete against Amazon in the cloud computing as well.

The biggest news today comes from Amazon, which is staking the “beta” label off of its EC2 service and announcing the following upgrades:

• Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
• There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
• Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
• Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
• We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
• We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains how Amazon’s Web Services are becoming more capable every day and makes a good case that if the economy goes down, the pay-as-you-go cloud computing model will find more takers among major enterprises. These moves to strengthen EC2 (offering service-level guarantees, load balancing, monitoring, and support for instances of Microsoft Windows and SQL Server) are steps aimed at appeasing Big IT—the IT managers who run big corporate data centers and still need convincing that they won’t get fired for offloading their corporate computation needs to the Web.

But this is where the winds are blowing. If you want to know what’s next in IT, all you need to do is follow Andy Bechtolsheim. One of the original founders of Sun Microsystems, who then moved on to found several other startups including Granite Systems, he became a bigwig at Cisco after it acquired Granite, and then returned to Sun to help save it from extinction. Now he is turning his attention to Arista (renamed today from Arastra), where he is chairman and chief development officer. The New York Times and others reported that he is leaving Sun, but he is in fact still staying there part-time helping them come up with next gen products including X64 and storage servers. GigaOm more details.

Arista’s 20-Gigabit switches are geared towards cloud computing data centers with tens or hundreds of of thousands of servers and throughput needs that run up to 100 terabits per second. Today’s data centers just can’t keep up.

Editor’s Note: This post was contributed by John McCrea, VP of marketing for Plaxo, which is at the vanguard of the data portability movement. He also blogs at The Real McCrea and does a weekly video podcast about “opening up the Social Web” together with Joseph Smarr, David Recordon, and Chris Messina at The Social Web TV.

As some of you know, I am a strong advocate of an evolution from the “walled garden” model of social networking toward an open Social Web, characterized by interoperability and data portability. Along the way, I have been both a cheerleader for all of the building blocks of the new “open stack” (including OpenID, OAuth, XRDS-Simple, microformats, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial) and one of the most vocal critics of Facebook. Over the past two years, I have never missed a chance to point out Facebook’s absence from any key event or announcement around the “open” movement. And I’ve tried many different techniques to encourage Facebook down the open path, some more controversial than others.

But I had an “aha moment” on Monday of this week at a rather historic event that could only happen in Silicon Valley – a User Experience (UX) Summit for OpenID which brought together representatives from Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Microsoft, AOL, Plaxo, and others. The stated reason for assembling this group, most of whom are in direct competition with each other, was in reaction to recent usability studies on OpenID (one by Yahoo and one by Google), which made it clear that the current implementations of OpenID are confusing to mainstream users. The unstated reason that fifty of us packed together, shoulder-to-shoulder, was to muster a collective response to Facebook Connect.

You see, it’s been about a month since the first implementation of Facebook Connect was spotted in the wild over at CBS’s celebrity gossip site, TheInsider.com. Want to sign up for the site? Click a single button. A little Facebook window pops up to confirm that you want to connect via your Facebook account. One more click – and you’re done. You’ve got a new account, a mini profile with your Facebook photo, and access to that subset of your Facebook friends who have also connected their accounts to TheInsider. Oh, and you can have your activities on TheInsider flow into your Facebook news feed automatically. All that, without having to create and remember a new username/password pair for the site. Why, it’s just like the vision for OpenID and the Open Stack – except without a single open building block under the hood!

And so this past weekend I found myself looking forward to Monday’s UX Summit with a mixture of optimism and great urgency. On Sunday, I tweeted that I was excited to be going. I was stunned by the first response to come back just a few minutes later, from my friend Dave Morin, of Facebook Platform fame, “Agreed! The OpenID UX Summit is going to be awesome tomorrow. Looking forward to it.” I had heard that Facebook had been invited, but, honestly, I really didn’t know if they were going to send anyone. Then I looked at the confirmed attendee list, and saw three other heavy-hitters from Facebook were signed up: Josh Elman, Mike Vernal, and Julie Zhuo, all, like Dave, key players on the Facebook Connect initiative. “That’s very interesting,” I thought…

Monday morning came, and I saddled up with Joseph Smarr and the rest of the Plaxo crew and headed over to Yahoo. After the intros, Allen Tom of Yahoo, who organized the event, turned the first session over Max Engel of MySpace, who in turn suggested an alternative – why not let Facebook’s Julie Zhuo kick it off instead? And for the next hour, Julie took us through the details of Facebook Connect and the decisions they had to make along the way to get the user interface and user experience just right. It was not just a presentation; it was a very active and engaged discussion, with questions popping up from all over the room. Julie and the rest of the Facebook team were engaged and eager to share what they had learned.

What the heck is going on here? Is Facebook preparing to go the next step of open, switching from the FB stack to the Open Stack? Only time will tell. But one thing is clear: Facebook Connect is the best thing ever for OpenID (and the rest of the Open Stack). Why? Because Facebook has set a high bar with Facebook Connect that is inspiring everyone in the open movement to work harder and faster to bring up the quality of the UI/UX for OpenID and the Open Stack.

The day was very productive, with sessions led by Max Engel of MySpace, Eric Sachs of Google, and Joseph Smarr of Plaxo, among others. Right before lunch there was a rising chorus to form a small working group to develop a common UI spec for OpenID. Hands raised include Chris Messina (Vidoop), Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Eric Sachs (Google), Max Engel (MySpace), and, drumroll, Julie Zhuo (Facebook).

Later in the day, there was a spirited debate about OpenID as a URL (as originally envisioned) vs. a new proposal to extend the spec to allow email addresses to be OpenIDs. Mike Jones from Microsoft was eloquent on the security risks of the email address approach. At one point, I thought the debate might devolve into chaos, but Dick Hardt, who delivered the infamous “Identity 2.0” keynote at OSCON three years ago, helped bring focus, “You have seen the competition; it is Facebook Connect. That is the new bar that we must meet.” The discussion found its way to constructive next steps; a few more folks joined the UI working group, and shortly after 5:00, the historic summit was adjourned. For those who want a little more detail, see my post, “Live Blogging the OpenID/OAuth UX Summit.”

Update: Friendfeed today released support for its Beta Real-Time feature. The API adds the ability to fetch realtime streams based on the Home, Room, and Friends List updates as they occur. While Friends Lists offer a way to port social graph data of your Twitter Follows to the Friendfeed platform, co-founder Bret Taylor said that was not yet available through the API “though we should add those methods in the future.”

Friendfeed’s launch of realtime services has set off a serious horse race on the micromessaging platform. While the New York Times contrasts Twitter and Yammer as eyeballs versus revenue, or consumer v. enterprise, Friendfeed finds itself positioned as an attractive candidate for building scoped message hubs without an IT oversight requirement.

Yammer’s appeal is the quality of its offering, which extends across Web, desktop, and iPhone instances. The Adobe Air client is elegantly deployed, with a preference page for updates that specifically defines the location of scroll-up notifications (I configured it to the lower left to avoid Twhirl’s hard-coded territory), the length posts remain visible (not adjustable in Twhirl), and the number of full text items (defaults to first 3).

If you’re an XMPP fan, you can setup IM from the Web client (Twitter has killed IM) in a simple 2-step process that pings you in Gchat and confirms in the Web client. The iPhone still awaits Apple’s push technology to round out the suite, but the spit and polish of the client suite neatly defines what Twitter and its third party support will need to do once they are challenged in the marketplace.

Identi.ca and its Laconica compatriots may have garnered a dedicated developer-focused version of Twitter’s high-visibility crowd, but there’s no papering over the weaknesses of a single point of failure at the center of the potential platform. Evan Prodromou and his open source team have outperformed expectations in cloning Twitter’s API and leveraging Twitter’s abdication of Track and now IM. But where Twitter used to stumble and shudder around high volume events such as primaries and debates, more recently the service has stayed up while it’s Identi.ca that goes dark.

Identi.ca’s fundamental problem is the lack of a viral trigger to boost adoption to a critical mass beyond those who feel used and abused by Twitter’s disingenuous path to stability and a revenue strategy. Twitter has successfully made the case for becoming a common carrier of realtime discourse, regardless of the current absence of the carrot we all bit into. Identi.ca’s open source roots may convert a few of the choir, but for true competition to emerge, another attractor must be offered as bait.

Friendfeed seems a plausible host for such a disruptor of Twitter’s power base. What realtime enables, and Track accelerates, is the swarm behavior which evangelizes micromessaging. Without realtime, Twitter is a bulletin board in the center of the town, a virtual water cooler where the fodder of overnight is chewed and refashioned as punditry for the midday crowd. Just as Yammer is work product meets group IM, Twitter is brand protection meets market intelligence.

Swarm behavior, by contrast, turns the Twitter idea into a wave of innovation, the realtime expansion of idea into action, of early warning into rapid decision making, of business intelligence into strategic deployment of resources. Swarms are as interesting for how people don’t react as for what the original spark suggests. As we learn from experience how specific nodes participate in the information stream, we can evaluate today’s silence or muted contributions to derive competitive insight not possible before micromessaging achieved traction.

Friendfeed’s original value proposition was as an aggregator, taking off from Facebook’s activity stream to add a conversational oasis where behavioral signals could be mixed with a limited social graph and explicit voting to create some degree of authority and information fidelity. But nowhere was the speed with which Twitter grew mirrored in the resulting Friendfeed community; the lack of swarm characteristics kept the dynamics insular, the service a refuge for critics of message length, instability, and A List blogosphere class warfare.

Add realtime and suddenly the space is recast. As Twitter Track refugees tire kick, they notice the holes in their social graphs on the new service. Almost immediately questions bubbled up on Identi.ca and Twitter: How can we port our Follows? Why does it take 30 minutes for Identi.ca posts to show up on FriendFeed when it takes seconds from Twitter? Which services are faster than others in hitting the realtime canvas?

What’s innately disruptive about Friendfeed’s realtime services is that its competitors can be used to debug and flesh out the service as the community responds to the swarm behavior it enables. The easiest way to check who was responsible for the 30-minute delay from Identi.ca to Friendfeed was to disable that subscription and enable one from Twitter. Since many Identi.ca users employ a bridge to pipe posts to Twitter, the message path still works into Friendfeed when you unsub from Identi.ca.

Once the pathway is cleared and the relative inefficiencies of Friendfeed’s inserting other services such as FLickr into the stream are calibrated, the next step is to solve the social graph issues. Here’s where Friend Lists loom large, as it should be relatively easy to set up mini-home pages with high value follows. The loser here will likely be Twhirl, since aggregating follows from Twitter and Laconica instances can effectively roll up multiple windows into a single interface. Alternately, you can embed multiple streams on a console.

Once the promised realtime APIs are released, Twhirl and Identi.ca will be able to recover some of their feature set, and of course the business conversations necessary to achieve parity with Twitter and vice versa will be joined. Earlier yesterday Prodromou enabled direct reply to specific messages, and a comparable ability from within Friendfeed would leapfrog Identi.ca past Twitter until all three players achieve parity. Identi.ca copied Twitter’s initial reply_id functionality when it appeared several months ago, but Twitter will have to decide whether it makes strategic sense to make it easy to talk cross-platform.

Much has been made of the differences between Friendfeed and Twitter, but realtime is the great leveler. Once the basics are ironed out, the differentiator between individual services will be much more in their effectiveness in acting as host to enough of the routing points of the overall micromessaging infrastructure to be the driver of standards. Just as Firefox (even with Chrome’s assist) continues to be the fulcrum of browser standards, so may Friendfeed step into the role of mediator between public and private micromessaging services.

Such a hybrid of intranet and extranet services will go a long way toward triggering the entry of the platform players, as email and IM become services that could be absorbed by the realtime architecture. That possibility certainly redounds to the incumbents, but users may be resistant to having their access to an open network constrained by a bigco audience acquisition and siloing bifurcation of the cloud. And just as Twitter consolidated the Track threat by purchasing Summize, we may see overtures in either direction by Friendfeed and Twitter, by Microsoft, Google, and Cisco, or open source patrons such as Oracle, IBM, and even Sun in the case of Identi.ca or an XMPP competitor.

Sun is releasing a new version of client-side Java insipidly called SE 6 Update 10 that sets the groundwork for JavaFX, a major overhaul of the runtime environment that’s set to debut before the year’s end and will challenge other RIA platforms such as AIR, Silverlight, and Google Gears.

Update 10 comes with two major consumer-facing improvements: a smaller footprint and enhanced speed. Whereas the current version of Java is a 14.5mb download, the newest has been slimmed down to 4.5mb. This will matter most for Windows users who don’t have high-speed internet access (since Java comes prepackaged on Macs and the difference of 10mb is inconsequential over broadband). Nevertheless, the move reflects Sun’s commitment to trimming down a technology that has been criticized for its bloat (many optional components no longer come preinstalled but must be added to the kernel after-the-fact).

Java apps will now enjoy shorter load times with a new quick starter tool as well. We’ll have to see just how instantaneous load times have become, but this is certainly an area where Java should improve since Java apps are noticeably slower to boot up than their Flash counterparts.

For Java to really take off on the web (as it was originally intended), it will have to become more developer-friendly. Update 10 doesn’t change a lot for developers, although Sun has reintroduced the idea of “applets” that make it possible to easily port in-browser Java apps onto the desktop. When consumers install the new version, they will immediately have the ability to drag and drop apps out of the browser. Developers that want to customize the way their apps look and function in the desktop environment will now have the tools do that as well.

These are just incremental improvements for developers compared to the ones that will accompany the release of JavaFX, which will support a simple scripting language called JavaFX Script. The idea is to make coding for Java just as easy as coding in Flash or JavaScript/HTML so developers don’t have to relearn too much when jumping platforms. JavaFX will also support high quality graphics (both 2D and 3D) and audio, taking particular advantage of Direct 3D on Windows.

Sun claims that Java is installed on 91% of PCs, or over 800 million desktops around the world. The company touts Java as an attractive RIA platform in particular because it already enjoys a substantial developer community and runs on a range of devices from mobile phones to TVs.

VMWare, is best known as a market leader in virtualization software, a type of software that simulates hardware for the purpose of separating a computer’s operating system from its hardware. For the consumer this allows one computer to run multiple operating systems, like Apple computers running Windows. For enterprise users, virtualization lets them run multiple virtual servers off of one physical server. However the software maker cannot seem to catch a break.

Research by IDC, and first reported by ComputerWorld, shows that VMWare’s market share of the enterprise X86 virtualization market fell from a reported 51% during 2007 to 44% during the third quarter of 2008. At the same time Microsoft’sHyper-V virtualization product has already had a material impact on Microsoft’s market share, even though the product was only released three months ago, as Microsoft’s market share jumped to 23% during the third quarter, up from 18% in the first quarter of 2008.

VMWare has not only lost a significant amount of market share in dramatic fashion, but also has lost a significant quantity of senior talent and share holder value. According to Reuters and the New York Times, since September 1st, VMWare has lost Richard Sarwal, their Executive Vice President for Research and Development, Mendel Rosenblum, a Co-Founder and their Chief Scientist, and Paul Chan, their VP for Product Development. As of the market’s close on Friday VMWare was trading at $20.69 per share, less than a sixth of its 52-Week high of $125.25 per share, and having lost more than 75% of its share price year to date. This comes after a tumultuous summer which saw VMWare’s founding CEO, Diane Greene, forced out by the board of its parent company, EMC, resulting in VMWare shares losing 25% of their value in one day.

Given the current economic climate, VMWare should be doing better than ever. With the growth of Apple’s Intel based computer platform people are using VMWare’s Fusionsoftware, and its competitor Parallels Desktop, to boot Windows on Apple hardware. But more importantly in the current economic downturn, one way that organizations will squeeze more computing power out of existing hardware is to spend budgets on virtualization software rather than on new servers. This is because virtualization lets enterprises deploy multiple virtual computers on a single set of hardware while simultaneously maximizing hardware utilization and consolidating resources. This is why virtualization was ranked one of the top ten strategic technologies to watch in 2009 according to Gartner. As further evidence of the growth in the virtualization market, IDC noted that virtualization shipments increased a staggering 53% between the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008. With enterprise grade products like VMWare Server and VMWare ESXi, the company seemed well positioned to make the most of the current economic situation.

The introduction of Hyper-V, which is priced extremely competitively, in combination with senior management turn over and slumping share prices has caused VMWare to be downgraded by at least three different investment houses (1, 2, & 3) in the past month. This combination of factors seems to be the perfect storm to disrupt VMWare from being able to take advantage of the opportunities which the current economic duress could have afforded it. Lets hope for the sake of their employees and their shareholders that they can get it together.

Twitter appears to have an unassailable lead in users and their resultant Follow clouds. Though Track is dead and IM is postponed indefinitely, the service has added a political track page with a company-selected keyword cluster around the political race. The result: a rapid flow of unmoderated comments with no social graph or conversational elements. As a commercial for Twitter’s dominant market share, it underlines both the potential and the uselessness of the product for its contributors. In other words, can I get you a pillow for your spot in our trunk….

Then FriendFeed comes along and seemingly duplicates this window into its stream, a much more constrained cloud divided into overlapping concepts called Friend lists and Rooms respectively. The new realtime feature gives you the same kind of auto-updating stream of comments, scoped to these two constructs. As Friendfeed co-founder Bret Taylor told today’s Gillmor Gang, anyone on Friendfeed can contribute to a public room or join a room to start a thread, as many did to the last debate conversation Wednesday night.

Or you deploy a live stream of a Friend list, where you decide whose comments you want to follow, or the generic full stream, or any group you configure. Friend lists harness earlier personalization features such as a Best of Day link, which in the case of a specific list presents 430 of the most Liked and commented upon threads of the people in that group. Jon Udell wondered whether you could manage lists via the API released a month or so ago, and Taylor confirmed read functionality but not necessarily subscription management (yet) was supported.

The realtime view and an embeddable version both support 100 entries going back, but Taylor acknowledged that a tool primarily designed to provide live-blogging functionality should make the whole stream available. He also announced that full API support for the underlying ong-polling that feeds the realtime stream will be available “next week”, allowing third-party services such as Twhirl to incorporate the functionality into their products. XMPP support has moved from a frequent request to “something we’re actively working on.”

As the debate unfolded Wednesday night, I found myself moving from the too-rapid flow of the Debate Room to my general Friendfeed aggregate stream, which was mostly focused on the debate as was Twitter and its related spawn. Managing that involved bouncing back and forth between Firefox with two pop-out windows of the room and friends streams, and the multi-window Twhirl application interface. Midway through the debate Twhirl seemed to fold, first with the Twitter feed and then with Identi.ca.

On the Gang, Taylor confirmed that the realtime streams were stable, save for one configuration bug quickly fixed that wasunrelated to the volume of data. But make no mistake about the significance of this evolutionary approach to the problem of scaling users up to challenge Twitter. Even with the relatively uncultivated cloud of current “friends” the quality of the main feed was already competitive with Twitter. Of course, that is helped by the fact that Friendfeed incorporates most of those same Twitter and Identi.ca feeds as part of its aggregated stream.

There, in a nutshell, is the opportunity for Friendfeed and threat for the incumbent. As Jon Udell noted on Twitter the night of the debate, it took about 6 seconds for a tweet to surface in the live stream. If Friendfeed can manage the thorny issues of keeping white listed access to API calls open while protecting the core business opportunities from being cannibalized by other services, there will be increased pressure on Twitter to unburden themselves of the constraints they so far have imposed around IM and Track.

The tortoise may be closing in on the hare. Where Twitter seems to stabilize by removing features, Friendfeed is gaining rapidly by carefully adding features that each in turn build on the preceding one. First Aggregation, then Rooms, Friend Lists, and now Realtime APIs. Friendfeed needs to improve its user acquisition functionality to harvest the fruits of the realtime conversations they are now making possible. Twhirl proves useful for following new people when they pop up in conversation, and the first service to integrate Follows and Track over realtime IM or an embeddable surrogate will quickly grab at least a strategic corner of this new information router console.

Enterprise IT looks at the emergence of cloud computing with mixed emotions. On the one hand, financial tough times breed layoffs, consolidation, and outsourcing away from IT’s control. On the other, a new breed of cloud-aware managers look to rationalize the metrics, security, and regulation challenges a distributed model brings. In the middle are companies such as Sonoa Systems, who just announced the closing of a $10 million Series C round of funding, led by Third Point Ventures with current investors Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners and SAP Ventures.

Sonoa sits in the middle of the API party, with a $50,000 box that proxies and manages a company’s cloud computing services. The ServiceNet appliance, or a virtual VMWare image for those who have their own hardware at $30K, lets IT manage customers of a company’s APIs with a single policy management system located at the edge of the enterprise. The product provides a library of out-of-the-box policies for content-based metering, profile-based access control, credential mediation, protocol interoperability, and governance, security, compliance, and audit tools.

This allows IT granular visibility into traffic spikes, provides tools to shape API access to specific partners at mandated SLAs, and removes development bottlenecks with a single declarative 15 minute installation of policies that work across multiple APIs. A policy could enforce rate limiting based on customer relationships, set rules to cache credentials to save repeated SQL queries for static data, and manage load balancing requirements.

By year’s end, Sonoa will provide a Cloud version on a subscription model, bringing API consolidation to small businesses or those medium-sized companies with pilot projects with a defined lifetime. It’s an early but significant sign of how robust the cloud computing model is becoming, as IT now has the opportunity to embrace that which they fear and reassert control as APIs become the heart of our economic engine.

This week’s activity in the tech sector seems guided by the rest of the economy, as the world holds its collective breath while waiting for the other, or any, shoe to drop. The presidential race seems to have stabilized with a significant if not conclusive lead for Obama. Apple announced refreshes of its laptop line, Microsoft sold off its Silverlight 2.0 news in advance of the PDC, and pictures and videos of the Gphone surfaced.

The Silverlight press conference produced a few interesting factoids, including the news that Silverlight penetration has reached 1 in 4 households after the launch at the Olympics and subsequent coverage of the Democratic National Convention. I asked Scott Guthrie how Chrome, Android, and iPhone support was coming, and got back: progress, optimism, and fuggetaboutit. Some subtle hints about data caching capabilities, forthcoming application announcements, and Silverlight code serving dual purpose within both browser and desktop code suggest Guthrie’s role within the company is continuing to expand.

Apple’s conservative approach to the so-called Netbook segment comes as no surprise. Each new announcement seems to roll up the last’s technological progress, which today centered on the MacBook Air’s build process being ported up and down the MacBook line. More forward-looking was the continued integration of Tim Cook and other executives into the presentation, with Cook in an increasingly active posture including some of the Jobsian humor long reserved for the boss. The net effect was of orderly consolidation of Apple’s transformation into the dominant architecture of the mobile Net.

The thread that ties so much of what’s visible of the tech iceberg together is the success, or difficulty, of managing the flow from old to new guard in the Cloud era. Age is really not a factor, as Jobs is signaling by changing Apple’s rhythm from Big Bang to continuous partial innovation. Microsoft is struggling not with the technology so much as the challenges of messaging, essaying the transition from structured to unstructured media so personified by the Twitter phenomenon.

And then there’s Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz, who broke a several-year moratorium on conversations with me with an intriguing new open source announcement. Whatever you think of the business model, certainly Schwartz continues to be a trailblazer in the leveraging of social media fundamentals.

It took a worldwide financial meltdown for Twitter to finally cough up the IM hairball. At BearHug Camp, I spent about 10 of the 30 minute executive visitation trying to pin down Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Alex Payne on when exactly Track and IM would be back, and in what order. Turns out the IM part isn’t coming back; it’s been moved from Broken to Build.

Evan Williams delivers the bad news with a refreshing frankness, suggesting the ROI of IM services for a small percentage of Twitter users puts it down the list below other more pressing priorities. And at the bottom of the email, he points at a fledgling third-party service that gives you a way of “tweeting” over the Jabber XMPP gateway. The author is mulling how to provide access to users’ follows. No mention is made of Track, of course.

Williams’ acknowledgment of the realities of surviving the viral success of a platform built on ideas but not necessarily execution comes not a moment too soon. Robert Scoble suggests in a Google Reader note that “Twitter is working on things to improve its already strong lock-in,” namely its dominant user base. But what this really does is focus pressure once again on Twitter’s business model, and begs the question once again why Twitter is taking so long to pass along permission to third parties such as Gnip to provide the scalable services the “small” minority of realtime users crave.

With Microsoft already releasing pre-PDC information about Live Mesh’s PubSub underpinnings, and many of the open source and hybrid third party services using Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services, realtime Tw*tter has a strong chance of surviving the nuclear financial winter. Startups need nothing more than Twitter’s permission and little or no venture money to enter the network of cooperating services.

Now that IM is dead meat, Twitter needs to clarify its deals with middleman services such as Gnip, and open up the kimono on independent developers locking down access. We’ll do our part to shine a light on these permissions or lack of them.

The stakes for control of the world economy have never been higher, and looking realistically at the prospects for technology pulling us out of the morass is Job One. Watching the market swan dive each day as it approaches the closing bell can be unnerving, but it says little about the fundamentals of the economy, or what can be done about it. If the tech bubble was the demo of what we’re going through now, what does the release version portend for a bottom or eventual recovery?

At a minimum, companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, and even Google live for these types of events. When discretionary buying is triaged, moved below essentials like food, shelter, and security, we adjust according to flexibility and ROI. Television and radio appear to be free, as does the Internet, so devices that bridge those domains are more highly valued than partial solutions. News programming becomes a staple because of its potential for heading off impact on job, cost of living, and health issues.

At work, the ability to compress information streams into actionable summaries quickly surpasses many services in value to the company. Monitoring competitors, community feedback sites, and influential nodes in the social media space often proves much more relevant to strategic analysis and business imperatives. From the individual perspective, those companies or groups that support these channels offer potential recovery from layoffs or a path to combining project participation into something close to full time work. Location-based tools such as those emerging around the iPhone 3G further accelerate the real time flow of optimized actionable intelligence.

At a higher macro level, what we do for so-called entertainment becomes magnified in these clustered spiraling phases. We escape to comedy, music, chat services, more aggressively pungent versions of news designed to both aggravate and alleviate the fear that underlies the times. Sandwiching these release valves into our lives becomes the end game, with devices such as the Slingbox, its new companion Slingcatcher product, and smartphones at the top of the list. The use of Youtube clips of cable news and political coverage has skyrocketed as the markets continue to fluctuate so dramatically from second to second.

How these trends manifest themselves at the market level itself will take a few months to materialize, but already the use of real time services from email news alerts to RSS aggregators to Twitter and its bretheren is pushing cable and radio networks aside. Tw*tter is the DVR of the Web, a Play, Pause, Fast Forward, and Rewind controller for navigating real time prioritized data and interleaving it with work, travel, and what now passes for relaxation.

The tools required for this are clearly immature, but smart technologists are already starting to establish virtual teams producing component code to patch together into stable-enough on demand services. Amazon has dropped prices for steady customers, Google and Mozilla have seeded Labs skunkworks to accelerate cloud-related assets, and Microsoft is within weeks of exposing the underbelly of its cloud development infrastructure to its third-party troops.

The election and its aftermath should prove a handy lens with which to view the new winners that will spring from the bloodbath in which we’re dogpaddling. Watch the river flow and you see the shape of things to come – a fragmenting of media from watching other people win and lose to “playing” along at home with real dollars at stake. Influentials must increasingly learn how to absorb confidential data and turn it into consumable fragments that stay ahead of the market rollercoaster while not overwhelming the audience with cross- and up-sells. The campaign rapid response team model needs to be baked out across industries, consumer protection alliances, and best practice educational and heath service watchdogs.

The winners will fit best into the DVR model, creating a quality of reliability and integrity akin to the virtual version of the family doctor, the general practitioner who depends on his business coming from knowing yours. We’re way past micromessaging as brand management or promotion; it’s now and for the foreseeable future the one device we need to be working, the one bill we need to keep paying until the fires die down and we return to our once familiar dog-eat-dog world of competing to get ahead. For now, it’s about keeping our head.

Back at the end of July, Microsoftee Dare Obasanjo attacked the Open Web Foundation for being a bunch of kids fresh out of college who hadn’t heard of IETF or other standards bodies. I dashed off a post calling on Dare to revert to his previously ecumenical ways of supporting bottom-up standards development, and to stop his partisan attacks on these Animal House attempts and their predatory sponsors from Google et al. The response in comments took me to task for being an idiot but others were not so sure.

Flash forward to a few days ago, when another post by Obasanjo popped up as a pingback linked to the phrase “personal attacks by Techcrunch” with more of the same, this time focusing on the Portable Contacts API promulgated by OWF co-conspirator Chris Messina and Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr. The money graf:

If anything, I’m concerned by the growing number of interdependent specs that seem poised to have a significant impact on the Web and yet are being defined outside of formal standards bodies in closed processes funded by big companies. For example, about half of the references in the Portable Contacts API specs are to IETF RFCs while the other half are to specs primarily authored by Google and Yahoo! employees outside of any standards body (OpenSocial, OAuth, OpenSearch, XRDS-Simple, etc). I’ve previously questioned the rise of semi-closed, vendor driven consortiums in the area of Web specifications given that we have perfectly good and open standards bodies like IETF for defining the Open Web but this led to personal attacks on TechCrunch with no real reasons given for why Web standards need to go in this direction. I find that worrying.

I called Messina up and arranged for he and I to have a conversation today on The Gillmor Gang, where we touched on the history and attitudes of Obasanjo in the context of what clearly is something too tempting to be left alone. Messina goes into some depth about the rationale for OWF and its genesis, mostly as the outgrowth of what Chris calls work done to solve small problems. OWF, as Messina suggests, is an attempt to help leverage legal issues common to many of the “specs authored by Google and Yahoo! employees outside of any standards body” to help move these useful tools from point solution to specs able to be bought into by big companies or even the aforementioned IETF.

I’ll let Chris explain the details of Portable Contacts and much more, but, though I tried to broker some conversation directly between Obasanjo and the college kids to bridge the gap between them, here I’ll just parse that first sentence of Dare’s:

growing number of interdependent specs – cleverly intertwined to shut out big company market force standards broadsides

poised to have a significant impact on the Web – threatening to overwhelm the right way of doing things with subversive amateur disruption of the Wild Wild Web

defined outside formal standards bodies – note the silent use of the word “open”

in closed processes funded by big companies – as opposed to the formal standards bodies funded by big companies.

Let me get this straight. These things are working, they grow from the grassroots into useful tools, we should go back to the good old days where market leaders create standards bodies like WS-I to shut out competitors’ work, and these homegrown efforts are closed because the same market leaders decline to participate when invited.

And a personal note: if using past words to underline how different an agenda seems to have emerged is a personal attack, then perhaps I’ll take it as a backhanded compliment that my perspective may be poised to have a significant impact on the Web too. I hope you’re right, Dare. Microsoft can’t afford to be anything but transparent about its interpretation of what the meaning of open is, with only three weeks and change to go to Mesh and the Windows Cloud’s promised open platform debut at the PDC.

This guest post was contributed by Pankaj Malviya, a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years experience in enterprise software product design, development, and implementation of customer service solutions for Fortune 500 companies. In 2006, Pankaj founded LongJump, a Platform-as-a-Service provider that helps companies rapidly develop and deliver customized applications online (see our coverage of LongJump here).

It’s time for corporate IT to get their heads in the clouds.

Cloud computing initiatives are gaining momentum with businesses of all sizes, particularly with enterprises that are looking to adopt the right solutions to address their ongoing business and IT challenges. Emerging on the horizon is a broad range of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that enterprise business and IT units are examining more thoroughly. PaaS solutions are appealing as a direct evolution of SaaS-based, single-discipline solutions that are targeted toward the horizontal enterprise.

Why should corporate IT departments rely on the costly, time-intensive maintenance of heavy infrastructure and continually reinvent the wheel to create powerful applications? PaaS offers a simple promise: develop, deploy and fine-tune enterprise-class SaaS applications within a single environment across all business units. The net effect is a more cost-effective, centralized way to extend, build and manage custom applications.

Thus IT is free to focus on innovating solutions that engage knowledge workers in increased productivity and collaboration and improve overall business efficiency. PaaS also affects the economics of application development, providing a faster time-to-value for developing, deploying and integrating custom applications, resulting in a more than 50 % improvement on productivity for total platform spend per dollar, according to McKinsey & Co.

As such, corporate IT has an important leadership role in applying PaaS. Unlike single-department SaaS tools where a business unit may have had primary say for functionality, adoption and manageability, PaaS has a cross-departmental impact within an organization. It’s critical for corporate IT, and not just the business units themselves, to fully understand these different platforms and provide the governance and manageability needed to sustain their value. Otherwise, it can become yet another rogue technology that IT will have to deal with, rather than the leveraged solution it promises to be.

Current PaaS providers offer many components resulting in widely different PaaS offerings that can be broken down into three buckets:

1. Delivery platforms such as Amazon EC2 or Google’s App Engine that provide a cloud environment for developers to host their applications.
2. Development platforms that offer cloud-based integrated development tools.
3. PaaS platforms that offer an end-to-end platform to facilitate both development and delivery of integrated custom applications.

What should corporate IT require in their PaaS solution? From LongJump’s customers, certain requirements keep coming up as key to their adoption and success. We’ve identified 7 requirements that all IT organizations should consider.

1. Enterprise-Class Platform: A PaaS solution geared for corporate IT should not only have a proven operational history, but also have a strong track record for application delivery, a scalable architecture, a high availability, reliable platform, and deployment flexibility. A growing consideration to plan for is whether the platform can be hosted or extended on-premise. PaaS vendors should be willing to back their platforms with SLAs.
2. Business Alignment Focus: PaaS presents a significant opportunity for both business and IT to align strategies to collaborate and achieve overall business goals with customized, integrated applications. Where information management is needed, a PaaS solution should provide IT with the capabilities to automate data policies and triggers, repeatable business processes, workflow and approval cycles, with the requisite built-in reporting.
3. Open Standards-Based Extensibility: Best-of-breed components should undoubtedly be present such as industry standard tools, plug-ins and APIs. Unfortunately, we are seeing many PaaS solutions requiring proprietary code and non-industry standard language knowledge to code on their platforms. PaaS offerings which rely on industry standards such as Java, XML, MySQL, Apache, etc., enable the use of customizable, reusable building blocks to lower development, service and maintenance costs, speed up time-to-value, and help a business extend the platform quickly by writing their own functions or making UI changes.
4. Enterprise and System Interoperability: By this time next year, another dozen or more competitive PaaS and PaaS-like offerings will likely emerge, yet currently there is no standard interchange for these systems adding to a risk of “lock in.” Thankfully, many businesses have and utilize existing SOA initiatives that already support common Internet-based connectivity to external systems such as SOAP/WSDL and RESTful web services. Any PaaS offering worth its salt must support these interfaces until a dominant interoperability standard evolves.
5. Application Administration Tools: PaaS should be highly serviceable, so that a company can easily administer it for users, group roles, permissions, version control, release management, data management, etc. It should also ideally connect to existing LDAP services to provide a single point of access for administration.
6. Visual Application Building Tools: PaaS offerings that feature visual application building tools help corporate IT build and realize applications faster and further before they have to roll up their sleeves and begin coding. Robust PaaS solutions should provide visual environments across the platform for layouts, forms, fields, validations, rules, formulas, workflows, etc.
7. Service Partner Providers: In many cases, corporate IT doesn’t have the resources to manage a custom application from scratch and would invariably need to bring in outsourced help. Does the PaaS provider have established partnerships in place with companies that provide essential specialized services that will help manage or optimize the PaaS solution? Businesses should inquire about these partnerships, since adopting a platform means the company is also committing to the PaaS provider’s hosting partners, server partners, consulting partners, etc.

It’s hard to miss the growing buzz around PaaS and Cloud Computing. Gartner named cloud computing one of the top ten strategic technologies for 2008, noting that web platforms are emerging to provide service-based access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through cloud computing environments.

There is a real promise for enterprise organizations to benefit from PaaS, but it’s important that IT fully take control and advantage to meet their application needs. Platforms that meet the needs and conditions faced within enterprise IT will have a real impact on an organization’s ability to streamline their application projects.