What these companies are trying to achieve is the creation of an offering to give businesses a complete cloud platform that includes all the aspects they need to build a private or hybrid cloud: from using existing resources in a cloud-style infrastructure (Eucalyptus’ sweet spot) to stack automation (rPath’s specialty), to providing a frontend that includes IT’s existing policies (newScale’s beat). The announcement sees the offering include a central “command and control” portal that is created from Jamcracker’s product.

From a strategic perspective, this move makes absolute sense; pulling all these disparate services together, which most private/hybrid cloud users need anyway, is a difficult job. A pre-integrated offering makes it easier for them to get on with the job of creating their cloud.

However, as we mentioned previously, this new grouping is in a very crowded space. OpenStack got a lot of attention when it announced it’s open (and free) cloud stack last month. At the same time, VMware is keen (subscription req’d) to provide an offering that has all the pieces needed to set up a private cloud. Meanwhile, offerings from Nimbula, Cloud.com and Microsoft are all trying hard to gain traction in this space. If the funding being thrown at this particular sector is anything to go by, investors also see it as a very promising area.

Enterprises are showing a growing interest in the cloud, and this, for better or worse, is generally focused on private or hybrid cloud models. Tools that make the provisioning and managing of internal clouds easier are a necessary tool to increase adoption. Whether this latest partnership can gain traction in an already crowded market is unknown, but these small vendors have a far better chance of succeeding united than they do going it alone.

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Since the acquisition, Jigsaw has been re-architected to work better within the Salesforce application, including a deep integration with Chatter, Salesforce’s real time status update service. With the new application, sales leads, changes of contact information and organizational profiles can be viewed within the salesforce application, all generated from up to date data created by real business interactions.

While the real time, highly accurate nature of the Jigsaw data is appealing, there is a significant barrier to the adoption of a crowdsourced approach. Many organizations consider the contact data for their customers to be an inherent part of their intellectual property and competitive advantage. Changes in the role of an important contact offer the business an opportunity to steal a lead on the opposition, and businesses are unlikely to be comfortable with leveling the playing field such that all their competitors share that same information.

Similarly, with so much data accruing about individuals on the social web, the fact that Jigsaw limits the data it collects to data entered by sales people misses a huge opportunity to be gained through the combination of contact information with social web content. New entrants in this market such as Etacts and Rapportive, both covered previously, are doing a great job of serving up social information about a contact within Gmail – services of this kind are attempting to span the divide between the social web and CRM – so-called social CRM offerings.

At $29 per user per month Jigsaw will appeal to sales teams that make use of contact lists. However for more progressive companies, aware of the value that lies within the social web, Jigsaw will offer little of value beyond the data cleansing aspects.

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Traditionally, cloud-computing services have been billed per user, per month, per machine or some other simple measure of use. While this approach works fine for simple billing situations, it’s problematic in situations where usage varied significantly from day to day. Many startups are using manual processes and complex spreadsheets for handling billing complexities, which is a barrier to scaling.

Seeing this opportunity, a number of startups have begun offering cloud subscription and billing services which can handle the monetization side of a cloud-computing business. Apart from Aria Systems, the best known billing and subscription vendors are Zuora, Monexa and Vindicia.

Aria Systems, founded in 2003, is a pure-play subscription and billing vendor that has achieved both SAS70 and PCI certification: important validation in a sector that is routinely handling sensitive financial data.

In terms of what this integration offers, via vCloud Director product’s API, the following is automated:

• Synchronization of account information, with native support for virtual data centers (vDCs) and virtual applications (vApps)
• Synchronization of both flat-fee and usage information for VMware vCloud Director including instances, storage, CPU, memory, and network bandwidth

In this way, VMware can offer significant flexibility to vCloud customers: one-time fees, subscription pricing, usage-based charging, etc. If you’re using vCloud, and want to run complex billing and subscription arrangements, Aria is, at this stage, your only option. That said, it’s a rapidly moving space and there’s a history of “exclusive” arrangements being rather temporary. As an example of this (and as I wrote about previously), until recently, Aria was the exclusive billing and subscription service integrated with NetSuite until Zuora came and crashed their party. All, as they say, is fair in love and war.

The main barrier to the adoption of third-party billing and subscription services has traditionally been the reluctance to lose margin on commoditized services. With a service such as IaaS however, there’s significant complexity in the way people use the products, so giving greater flexibility to the different monetization options is valuable.

The cloud subscription and billing space is emergent, and vendors are moving fast to integrate with service providers as rapidly as they can. This integration is another example of service providers farming out non-core functions to third-party providers.

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The Apptio product enables IT to manage the cost and quality of IT services by providing visibility into the costs associated with technology inside a corporation, and the value derived from those expenditures. Products in this sector seek to help IT departments map their IT spend to their business goals; competing products in the on-premise space include IBM’s Maximo product. Apptio’s current user base includes Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, BNP Paribas, Cisco, EMD Chemical and Starbucks.

Commenting on the funding, and in particular the timing around the round, CEO Sunny Gupta said in a release:

We are operating with a very strong cash position, but still received high interest from outside investors which ultimately influenced the timing of this financing round. Customer adoption of our Technology Business Management solutions has doubled, and with this funding we can rapidly accelerate our growth, launch new products and pursue new markets to further cement our leadership in this multi-billion dollar market.

With extreme pressure on corporate IT to provide both transparency over their spend and achieve ever-increasing levels of efficiency, services that help IT leaders gain visibility over their IT resources will become more valuable. One could argue that a solution such as this is more at home as a core part of the organization’s enterprise resource planning system, but so far, Apptio’s on-demand business model and its software are winning customers and keeping the firm’s venture backers ready to give Apptio more cash.

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Joining other cloud, or cloud-able, content management offerings such as Box.net and SharePoint 2010, M-Files Cloud Vault moves away from the typical folder-based approach that content management traditionally takes and replaces it with a keyword and tag driven file system. In the M-Files approach, documents are classified as a common type, such as an invoice, proposal, message/email, agreement, etc., and descriptive tags are added.

This approach towards documents is similar to that taken by Gmail with regard to email: There’s one “storage vault” where documents are stored, with tags, labels and rich search used to find files. The difference here is a move away from a tree structure of nested folders. M-Files allows searching based either purely on metadata (type, date, company, etc.) or full text searching.

M-Files follows the model of other products — such as Jungledisk and Dropbox — and fools the operating system into thinking that the cloud storage is a local drive. In this way, users can find and open files using the traditional search and open dialogs within Windows, both online and off great if you’re a windows user – not so well if you’re not. This also means that M-Files natively works with all applications: Open, attach and save functions within desktop applications can see files stored on M-Files. The integration of desktop applications with cloud document storage is an approach that others, including MainSoft (whom I’ve written about before) also take. While there are many offerings in this space, the market for this sort of product is massive. Hence, there’s an opportunity for many vendors to be successful in their particular niche.

Documents are stored on a “hosted server managed by Motive systems,” but M-Files can also be installed and run as an on-premise application. Given that M-Files is sold as a product, customers could choose to deploy it on their own choice of cloud infrastructure,  for example, one could deploy M-Files over Amazon Web Services to give a true, cloud-hosted product.

In terms of pricing, the standard product is $19.95 per month per user. M-Files is a nice halfway step for businesses wanting to be able to leverage the power of connected and aggregated data. Functionally it’s a nice fit for enterprise users who are accustomed to the Windows way of working – the pricing while at the upper end when compared to offerings like Box.net, is not completely out of the ballpark.

M-Files customers options both in terms of how they work and also where their data is held: public cloud, private cloud, hosted servers or fully on-premise.

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VMLogix provides a management console for cloud deployment, allowing users to automate and manage the provisioning of both internal and external cloud resources. Citrix intends to include the VMLogix console within its OpenCloud platform to provide a complete cloud management offering that works across different products, including Microsoft’s Hyper-v, Xen and VMware’s own virtualization offerings.

This acquisition, and the broader OpenCloud initiative, is in response to the demand from enterprises for a hybrid approach toward cloud computing (the desire to manage and automate provisioning of systems regardless of where they are: on-premise, public cloud, or a combination of the two).

It’s a busy area. I recently covered Adaptive Computing, a company that offers similar software and will soon announce a Series A funding led by none other than Intel Capital. In my post, I detailed the significant funding and acquisition activity in the space; we also recently covered Joyent’s aquisition of Layerboom. All this activity is indicative of the jockeying for position in what is set to become the massive hybrid cloud automation space.

What’s interesting about the Citrix OpenCloud approach is its complete vendor agnosticism. It allows enterprise customers to manage a mix of public and private cloud services from a single management console, even if they use these services from diverse cloud providers. In commenting on the acquisition, and the broader OpenCloud strategy, Wes Wesson, chief strategy officer for Citrix said:

What we hear continually from corporate customers in this space is, first I want the economics and elasticity of the cloud today in my existing data center… Second I want the flexibility to move workloads as it makes sense between private and public clouds, with security and performance assured. And third I want the flexibility to change and move providers.

The VMLogix acquisition and the general OpenCloud initiative are helping meet these objectives. Strategically, the move allows Citrix to shift focus somewhat away from their own infrastructure products and services, and gain market share providing a solution-agnostic management level that sits atop discreet infrastructure offerings. Citrix has also come out in support of OpenStack, the Rackspace and NASA-led grouping working on open-source tools designed to ease the multiple cloud vendor management pain. At VMWorld, Citrix will demonstrate the ability to manage workloads across XenServer running as both on-premise and virtual machines running in an OpenStack-managed public cloud, all from within a single management console.

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Qwest has partnered with Geminaire — the disaster recovery vendor — to supply this service, which will be hosted within a Qwest CyberCenter. The solution will protect email and databases and allow access to content in the event of a server or network disruption.

Currently DR in the cloud is mainly limited to either cloud storage (for example a business may chose to replicate data from their own data center onto cloud storage) or mail archiving (Google, for example, offers archiving and retention for email). The cloud is a natural place for DR to occur for a number of reasons:

1. The inherent flexibility of the cloud means that fundamental load spikes that business continuity services create can easily, and economically, be met.
2. Part of this benefit is seen from the ability to scale by use in the cloud: As disaster recovery is only needed in the event of a disaster, low level preparedness is a natural fit for the cloud.
3. A disaster recovery process that relies on one particular geographical location (an on-premise data center for example) is a risk in the event of a disaster. Having data in the cloud allows for geographical dispersion.

The Qwest offering comes as a DR package including failover, remote operations and real time testing. The key here, however, is a comparison between organizations making their own DR preparations in the cloud via standard storage and a fully packaged offering like this from Qwest. Because disaster recovery is very much an insurance policy, it’s important that it isn’t high cost. The very value that Qwest is offering — feature completeness — could well create a pricing barrier to adoption. At $550 per month on a 3-year contract, users could buy a significant amount of storage on Amazon S3, a bunch of email-archiving licenses, and still have change left over . Time will tell whether businesses consider there to be sufficient value offered by a package deal like Qwest’s. If the relative lack of SMB-focused DR offerings is anything to go buy, this is a very price conscious market.

Whether it’s via an all-in-one provider or from a home-baked storage service, cloud disaster recovery is an important service, having data and applications standing ready to switch on in the event of a disaster is important for business continuity, by providing a fully managed service to allow SMBs to access cloud DR, Qwest is trying to bring this service to a new class of customer.

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Ever since Marc Benioff announced Chatter at the DreamForce conference late last year, the concept of bringing a Facebook-like social newsfeed to enterprise has gained attention. While Salesforce.com wasn’t the first company to embrace the newsfeed (Yammer, for example, has a microblogging offering for enterprise that long predates Chatter), Chatter was the first product from a mainstream vendor that took the newsfeed concept and applied it to more than people. In Chatter’s case, any piece of data that resides within a force.com application can become a Chatter item.

Chatter brought this concept to the attention of mainstream enterprise users, and it wasn’t long before analysts began to see that social feeds would be very prevalent in 2010. As Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz said;

While integrating social tools into other systems is still nascent, social technologies will increasingly become services to adjacent technologies. Concepts like social-enabled content management and social-enabled business intelligence will take shape in 2010 as vendors begin to integrate social technologies with other technologies in their portfolio.

Seeing this trend, Box.net is introducing a newsfeed that aims to encourage engagement directly within the feed: when users are opening, editing or sharing a document within the Box.net content archive. In execution, the Box.net newsfeed looks like you would expect: It’s appearance (see screen capture below) borrows heavily from Chatter, which in turn borrows from Facebook’s wall.

However, the rapid adoption of newsfeeds does raise some interesting questions. With more and more enterprise applications moving to the cloud and leveraging their connectedness to present information in a real-time dashboard, keeping a watchful eye over that dashboard is a necessity. I put this issue to Box.net CEO Aaron Levie asking how users can create a single place for social streams to aggregate. While I’m sure he’d hope that all Box.net users would spend a significant portion of their day within his application, the reality is that users each have unique workflows. How can a product-centric newsfeed reflect that?

His response reflected the issues enterprise staffers face with regard to social streams:

Given the diversity of critical business applications that people live out of today, I don’t think the enterprise is moving towards a single feed that rules them all… Our mission at Box is not to compete with other social streams, but rather to provide a content-centric feed of what’s going on within our customers’ organizations

This brings us back to the need for some clarity around aggregation of cloud data. As more and more cloud-based applications provide social news streams, the issues around filtering the noise will become more pressing.

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Retail POS is a complex area ripe for disintermediation; traditional POS systems require retail stores, who aren’t generally comfortable or up-to-date with infrastructure and software maintenance, to have their own on-premise servers and maintain software. Using the cloud computing theme of abstracting IT management away from the end user, Vend is a new approach to POS systems. It’s one of the first examples of a persistent cloud app that runs directly on the front lines of business with hardware that’s little more than a standard PC with keyboard and mouse. As we wrote at the end of last year after the launch of Jack Dorsey’s Square product:

The marriage of computing and connectivity without the shackles of being tethered to a location is one of the biggest disruptive forces of modern times. It is (and will continue) to redefine business models, for decades.

Vend has interesting timing: The launch of more accessible mobile devices such as the iPad has provided a glimpse of what a medium-format mobile device can do for a work situation. Vend is a nice example of an application that provides a simple front end retail workers can use and hides the complexities in the cloud. From a technology perspective, Vend takes advantage of HTML5 to cache locally, so brief connectivity issues don’t affect the use of the system, and the application is hosted at Rackspace on their cloud service.  From a scaling perspective, this gives Vend the ability to roll out multiple servers to scale quite easily.

Fashion retailer Gregory/Ricochet is using Vend in 12 stores nationwide, opting to use it on iPads instead of traditional point-of-sale hardware. For a multi-outlet store like this, having inventory automatically coordinated across all branches — along with inventory data being updated in real-time — provides a benefit that traditional on-premise software can’t match. Not to mention the significant cost savings moving away from having their own infrastructure brings:

With Vend, we can retire a mountain of old equipment that was costing us thousands of dollars to maintain.

Continuing the “don’t make end users think” theme — Vend is integrated with third-party software and hardware — from accounting applications to barcode scanners and cash drawers, and is built in such a way that end users can mix and match software and hardware to meet their particular needs.

Vend is just one example of cloud smarts coming to retail, but as an emerging trend, it is an example of the disruption the cloud can bring.

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Nasuni Filer is an NAS-like virtual file server that allows businesses to store files in a variety of clouds from Amazon, Iron Mountain, Nirvanix and Rackspace. The way in which Nasuni is trying to rise up above the other players is by creating a very local-feeling, NAS-like experience and ticking off the security boxes from the get-go. To this end, Nasuni caches all files locally to ensure performance is the same as with purely local storage, and all files are stored fully encrypted in the cloud with disaster recovery built into the core product.

Some might see this as a best-of-both-worlds solution. Nasuni certainly hopes so. In a somewhat confusing move that sees Nasuni try to keep both traditional IT and cloud proponents happy, however, the company is promising potential customers that they can keep their existing IT infrastructure and work within familiar environments, all while leveraging the efficiencies that the cloud brings.

Nasuni charges at a monthly-plus-data rate. There’s an application access fee of $300 and data charges that vary across providers. Nasuni has simplified data charges by including transfer costs within the storage price, but, in what may be a deal breaker for companies with regularly changing file storage, Nasuni keeps data snapshots in the clouds even when the original data is deleted. For some companies, this may result in unacceptably high storage charges.

Nasuni has created a nice product, but it’s a product conflicted by trying to keep both the traditionalists and the progressives happy. That’s a difficult strategy to take, and one which may limit their success.

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Image source: Flickr user Michael Dornbierer