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Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

In a simultaneous announcement at the RSA security conference in San Francisco and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday afternoon, VMware Chief Technology Officer Dr. Stephen Herrod made two extraordinary revelations. One is that his company is working on a technology that would give businesses with "BYOD" policies for their employees a way to deploy virtual phones on virtual devices. This would maintain business assets on devices that employees purchase for themselves and use as their work phones.

"The idea is actually pretty simple," explained Dr. Herrod to attendees of the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA. "You have your phone that you go out and buy, and you go to an app store and download a level 2 hypervisor that's going to be in place there. Then when you show up at work, what you're able to do is, rather than get a work-issued phone, you're going to get a work-issued virtual phone."

Consider something called a talent profile. It's a digital portfolio that encapsulates your work history, your skill set, your accomplishments, and your faults. It can be used to rate you. It will reside on a cloud-based service. In the sense that you will always have access to it, you own it. In the sense that human resources departments worldwide will also always have access to it, so do they.

Red Hat has been involved with OpenStack development for some time. Unlike the bulk of companies involved, however, Red Hat has gone about its work quietly and without "officially" joining the effort. Red Hat still isn't saying exactly what it hopes to get from OpenStack contributions, but Brian Stevens did divulge a bit about the company's involvement.

Stevens is Red Hat's CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. Right now, he says Red Hat has no "confirmed" product plans for OpenStack but the company is "just finding additive ways where we can get involved in the community and help move OpenStack forward."

Last month, veteran IDC analyst Dan Vesset predicted that while Hadoop will become a standard component of the modern data center, by 2015 the market around Hadoop will have matured at such a rate that the major players we recognize today probably would no longer exist. MapR - a commercial Hadoop provider whose name was inspired by the MapReduce programming model for Hadoop - was one of the companies on Vesset's target list for acquisition, and perhaps a ceremonial asterisk for history once Wikipedia emerges from blackout.

So you might expect the predictions of MapR CEO John Schroeder for the year 2012 would not include obscurity for his own company. But Schroeder makes at least an arguable case: The difference, he says, between the database market in 2012 versus the one from 1992 has to do with the customer's preference to refrain from vendor lock-in, and that customer's newfound ability to ensure against it.

It's almost impossible to believe now, but when Microsoft premiered its Windows Azure service back in October 2008, there was genuine speculation over whether the company would try to muscle its way into the cloud the way it did with Internet Explorer during the war with Netscape. What was the hook? What Windows service or feature would be so irresistible that would require Azure, that no other competitor would be able to gain a footing?

Most conspiracy theories seem stupid three years or so later, after they've failed to come to fruition. Now that Amazon is the leader (albeit amid good competition) in cloud-based virtual machines, VMware is the leader in virtualization services for the enterprise (with Citrix keeping it on its toes), Salesforce (it's still amazing to say it) has become the leader in cloud-based applications, and Heroku (a Salesforce product) is believed to be within striking distance of leadership in cloud-based apps platforms, it becomes not only feasible but practical to consider Azure in terms of relevance.

There is a continuing change in the way businesses are thinking about the concept of disaster recovery and system maintenance, brought on perhaps for the first time since the advent of the Internet itself by government agencies. In researching how huge, country-wide data networks should plan for the contingency of terrorist attack or natural disaster, agencies such as the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security and its E.U. equivalent, ENISA, have begun adopting an emerging concept given an old name: resilience.

It's the key lesson being taught by cloud technologies such as OpenStack, and governments are learning it: Because failures happen, systems should expect them and overcome them - in advance, if possible - rather than wait for them and react. This lesson is having an impact on key data center technologies, most notably virtualization. Now, VMware is offering advice to its customers that bears the traditional "disaster recovery" moniker, but which is in the midst of altering its tone.

"What if you could quantify the world's consumer behavior," asks a company video, "and use it to make different and better decisions than you ever have before?" This is the question that has been asked over the past decade by a company called DemandTec, a manufacturer of retail analytics software for analyzing economic and behavioral trends around consumer purchasing decisions.

The idea is to change the conventional way manufacturers engineer their product lifecycles: first by developing it, then by marketing it upon completion. Those cycles have historically been separate; DemandTec's idea is to merge them, to make businesses make strategic merchandising decisions (e.g., "How about marking that tablet down to a hundred bucks?") rather than marketing corrections (e.g., "What if we changed that tablet's promotional slogan?"). It sounds like an idea IBM could wrap its head around. Today, that's exactly what IBM did.

For a company whose secondary logo is the word "Software" with a big slash through it, Salesforce.com may have already become the nation's leading producer of software conferences for businesses. A huge crowd has assembled at the Jacob Javits Center in New York to hear Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff deliver one of his already-legendary keynote speeches. The theme is expected to be another extension of his "delivering on the social enterprise" motif.

In recent months, Salesforce has been making inroads in building a business software ecosystem around its Chatter system of communication, developing and enabling the development of tools that could potentially wedge Outlook and SharePoint out of the enterprise. Expect a stronger message on the subject of reducing and/or eliminating middleware and message queues, a topic that Salesforce marketing has been chattering about in recent days. ReadWriteWeb is delivering a running summary of Benioff's speech as it happens.

This could be your next social productivity platform. It's free, it's cloud-based, it's synchronized, and it can integrate with your Gmail. And even if you've never heard of Salesforce.com, you'll know it now. Do.com is for real.

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