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We recently spoke with Bruce Cleveland at InterWest Partners. Bruce has been part of InterWest's IT team since 2006, focusing on investments in the software and services sector, with an emphasis on software as a service (SaaS) and analytical applications. He is a board member of Cloud9 Analytics, Marketo, Right90, and Signal Demand. Prior to joining InterWest, Bruce was one of the original members of the Siebel executive team. So, he knows enterprise software. Having just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, we wanted to get the investor's view of this market.

Xing is one of the top business social networks in the market today, especially in Europe. But the new features they're touting for the paid Premium users are grossly underwhelming.

In general terms, the platform is solid. The free functionality is more than adequate for the kind of networking you'd do on LinkedIn or any other professional site. But we have a hard time imagining anyone eagerly laying down cash for the ability to upload their resume and get birthday reminders.

As of today, the shareholders of Sun Microsystems have approved the merger with Oracle at a meeting at Sun's offices in Santa Clara, California. Announced on April 20th, Sun will be bought for $9.50 a share in cash, a grand total of $7.4 billion.

Thus far, the merger has encountered some bumps in the road. Despite confident statements from Oracle predicting the closure of the deal this summer, an antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice is underway. The DOJ extended the window for looking in to the company past the usual 30-day limit.

Douglas Rushkoff — author, documentarian, and teacher — is a man on a mission. As a step towards getting "people to see the software-like code lying underneath how they interact," his latest book, Life, Inc., explores the nature of money, our economic system, and how a corporate mindset has shaped who we are as people in modern society.

As a media theorist who's written about some of the most influential ideas of the digital age, Rushkoff is second to none. In Life Inc., he describes not just corporations, but how we all can change to an "open source economy" that favors decentralized value creation over banking and central currency. We spoke with him to ask more about what this new economy would look like and how the Web is involved.

In little more than a month, the beta of Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile has garnered the attention of more than 3,000 developers. But the beta hasn't just gotten some respectable use: it's changing what kind of apps get created.

Titanium Mobile is aimed at those looking to build apps for the iPhone and Android, but who'd rather code in standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript instead of Objective-C or Java. By opening up the most popular mobile devices to anyone with Web development chops, an entirely different class of app has taken over on the platform, compared to what you'll commonly see in the App Store.

Diagram makers, rejoice. Today, Gliffy has released the newest version of their popular SaaS tool, and it's got a whole new look.

Now, Gliffy and other Web-based offerings may not have really killed desktop options like Visio and Omnigraffle yet, but since its unveiling several years ago, it has made some big strides and captured a respectable chunk of the market.

Proprietary intranet vendors, be scared. Be very scared. Today, Development Seed, the open source shop behind DrupalCon in DC and other endeavors, has released the public beta of Open Atrium.

Open Atrium is a free and open source intranet built as a Drupal distribution, with some impressive functionality available out of the box. Not only is this a solid piece of software to begin with, but its makers are evangelizing what they think could be a transformative paradigm for extending Drupal's capabilities.

Amplify, a service for gathering and sharing clips from the Web, has added the ability to subscribe to the clippings of others in a fashion very similar to Twitter's asynchronous following. Amplify is tailored to both public sharing, publishing to a group, or private collection of material; the service occupies an interesting space somewhere between a social network, an enterprise app, and social bookmarking.

With a dead simple interface for selecting text and images from the Web, you've long been able to publish your clips to both Twitter and Facebook. But until now, there was no way to get a stream of clips from those you follow directly within Amplify.

Disclosure: Socialtext is sponsor of the ReadWriteEnterprise channel.

Hot new trends are hard to resist, especially when they open up lucrative new markets. For proof positive, look no further than Socialtext, which today released a Microblogging Appliance independent of the rest of their enterprise collaboration offering.

Long an advocate of the integrated approach to social software, this is the first time Socialtext has unbundled any part of their software. In addition to competing with startups like Yammer and Socialcast, the company aims to use the appliance as a teaser for their complete platform.

This morning, Microsoft announced the technical preview to Office 2010 to much fanfare. The most prominently touted aspect has been the Web access to the suite, which has been seen as Microsoft's answer to the way Google, Zoho and others have dominated the SaaS market for office suites thus far.

But what they didn't tell you is that the browser-based version of Office 2010 will not be part of this technical preview, which will have its own release for which no date has been set.