ReadWriteEnterprise

Alfresco Software reported record revenues today, providing a signal that open-source technologies are a top choice for the enterprise as the economy moves out of the recession and cloud computing becomes more prevalent.

Alfresco reported both record fourth quarter earnings and record revenues for 2009. Growth is up 61% compared to last year. We look at these results with a grain of salt but in Alfresco's case it increased its staff 29 percent and also added 300 customer, including companies such as Cisco, Merck and the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development.

This SAP story is getting a bit more interesting. Today we sat in in on a call with its team over at StreamWork, the new collaboration, SaaS service, previously known as 12Sprints.

Dave Meyer lead the discussion. For the first time, at least for us, he helped crystalize how SAP will extend its relevancy. Meyer and his team were joined by StreamWork partners -- a curious mix of companies that include Scribd, Evernote and Box.net, not exactly the trio you'd expect to show up as partners with SAP.

In the past few weeks we've seen more references to FourSquare as a potential enterprise tool. The discussion represents an emerging law of Enterprise 2.0 Inevitably, a consumer trend in the social technology space will start to seep into the business world.

Hutch Carpenter of Spigit says it is a two-year lag before the enterprise adopts a social computing trend. He writes that wikis emerged in 2002 as a consumer tool and by 2004 came into the enterprise. Social networking emerged in 2006 and by 2008 had made its way into a business context. Microblogging hit in 2007 and by 2009 it became a central part of the Enteprise 2.0 suite.

The Google Apps Marketplace has launched a YouTube channel to promote its third-party partners.

Less than a third of the vendors have posted videos to the YouTube channel. Google Apps is not rocket science but the idea of integrating third-party applications into Google Apps is a new concept for most customers. The YouTube channel will by no means make an app successful. But it does provide a channel to explain what the product does and how it fits with Google Apps Marketplace. And the video can be used in different channels, too, such as on a blog or Facebook.

The Google break from China raises some questions for the enterprise considering cloud computing. It's one thing if the network goes down. That can be fixed. But when the government does its own blockade, that's another story.

Google Apps customers face this very issue. Google has the thorny task of explaining to its customers of what they may expect when using Google Apps in mainland China.

IBM, Canonical and Simmtronics will offer emerigng markets a fully loaded, cloud-connected Netbook for $190. It's a clear example of how a cloud-based approach fits with the emerging Netbook market and its importance in the global marketplace as a channel for enterprise collaboration technologies.

The Simmtronics Simmbook will initially be available in South Africa and emerging markets. In addition to African countries, the Simmbook will also be available in India, Thailand and Vietnam.

Microsoft is testing a microblogging service called OfficeTalk that is much like Twitter. The service is designed for the enterprise and appears it will be offered as an on-premise service.

OfficeTalk is being developed by OfficeLabs, the Microsoft lab for testing internally developed ideas.

The effort to bring Facebook into the enterprise continues with more services using Outlook as a gateway to extend a contact network and use as a foundations for a CRM environment.

SenderOK is one of the latest effiorts to give more context to email by showing a picture of the sender in an email message. Too bad it only works on Windows XP or Vista. Ugh.

The disruptive forces of Enterprise 2.0 may seem to provide the new players with a certain opportunity for companies looking at new ways to streamline but also scale productivity and innovation.

But can these small companies really make any dent in the market when they face the giants that increasingly offer similar services? Sure, the new players innovate. But look at the size of the channel that a company like IBM has to market its services.

A case in point is today's announcement by IBM about the gains with LotusLive and new additions to Lotus Foundations.

Novell is providing the first glimpse of Pulse, its new real-time collaboration service. The new service will eventually fully integrate with Google Wave. This version does not include Google Wave as part of its service. But there is an expectation that eventually the integration will serve as a federated platform that may serve as the basis for new open-source collaboration efforts.

Novell is releasing the service initially to analysts and participants at BrainShare, its user group meeting next week in Salt Lake City. Each person will get to invite one new user, Novell will provide a fuller release in the next few months. A release at the end of the year will include OpenID as a core aspect of the platform.