We've hired a couple of experienced practitioners of cloud computing as our daily writers for ReadWriteCloud. Mike Kirkwood is a seasoned Enterprise Architect from Berkeley and has been a Sr. Manager supporting large consumer applications. Tim Hastings is a hands-on Technical Architect of web services, based in England. In addition, ReadWriteEnterprise editor Alex Williams will oversee the site and be a contributing writer.

With our two highly experienced topic experts and the editorial hand of Alex Williams, we're sure that ReadWriteCloud will help you gain new levels of efficiency and control over your web-based infrastructure. Check out ReadWriteCloud here.

Activity streams, cloud computing, and 3D flat-panel TVs and displays are among those at that peak. Gartner defines this as a "phrase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections." And although according to Gartner's map, it means these technologies may be on their way to mainstream, the next stop is one of disillusionment because those technologies failed to live up to expectations.

Gartner's report examines 1800 technologies as well as trends in 75 industry and topic areas. These reports are meant to provide a snapshot into emerging technologies. as well as estimates in the time until these technologies become mainstream. Cloud computing and e-readers, according to the report will be mainstream in less than 5 years, but we have to look beyond the five year mark for mainstream 3D printing and robots.

Gartner identifies several themes from the Hype Cycle report, including the importance of UI, data-driven decision-making, and cloud computing.

He notes that the service-level agreements (SLAs) for all the hosted applications are the same as those offered in the operation's traditional on-site computing environment - that is, 99.999% uptime. Google only offers 99.9% as does Amazon S3...and yes, those extra digits make a world of difference.

In addition, DISA also uses the same information assurance process (the process of managing information-related risks) for the RACE applications as it does for any apps running on the traditional, on-site computing platform. They've even cut the security accreditation process from 80 days to 40 thanks to built-in information insurance controls in RACE. 

One of the most obvious benefits of a cloud computing infrastructure, though, is the speed of deployment. The cloud platform has cut the acquisition time for a new server from 6 months to 24 hours - a change that means DISA will now be able to rapidly deploy new applications to the military in record time. "That's a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements," says Sienkiewicz.

RACE runs using VMware on HP blade servers. Defense Department customers can choose either Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux and are able to configure their server with up to 4 CPUs, 8 GBs of memory and up to a terabyte of storage. Test servers are $500 per month and production servers are $1200 per month. Next year, RACE will be deployed on the DoD's classified network (SIPRNet) as well. 

Windows in the Cloud

Given how many companies rely on Windows servers to run their business, adding support for this operating system makes good sense for Amazon. The pricing for these Windows services, however, is considerably higher than that for running Linux instances on EC2.

As Mary Jo Foley notes, Amazon will also attend Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference next week, which is interesting, given that Microsoft is also expected to unveil its own cloud computing platform at this conference.

For the most part, though, the outrage over the outages and downtimes suffered in cloud computing are overblown. Even when they last for hours, there are few cases where complete data loss has occurred (e.g. Google Docs comes back up, but your data store is wiped clean)...well, unless you count Ma.gnolia.

But Gladinet seems to tap into that primal fear that comes with the loss of control accompanying cloud computing; the fear that your precious data will one day be lost to the ether. O.K. sure, that's not all the software does. It also connects your computers together so you can share files, provides a platform for different cloud services to interact with each other, and provides tools for easily moving your local data to the cloud. Yet, out of all its features, the fact that you can keep PC and cloud in sync - with a local backup for safekeeping - is probably one of the service's biggest selling points.

Is that the future of cloud computing, though? A combined cloud/PC experience? Or will cloud computing eventually make our hard drives, filled with locally stored files, obsolete? With the rise of netbook computing and mobile computing, it seems that the transition has been directly influenced by the number of web/mobile apps that now replace what local software once provided.

So where does that leave a software program like Gladinet? Is it a useful platform for hybrid computing? Or just a transitional piece holding us over until the cloud is all we use?

Most interesting perhaps is that the service is entirely open source, offering anyone a full copy of all its source code. Customers will pay for hosting, a Service Level Agreement and customer service. Today 10gen compares itself to Google App Engine and offers hosting for server side Javascript and Ruby.

Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson is one of the most publicly visible venture capitalists in the market and his backing is sure to lead to interesting connections. USV + open source in cloud computing may or may not work well - but it won't be boring. 10gen was founded by Kevin Ryan, the former CEO of DoubleClick, the massive display ad company that Google is currently going through court trying to buy.
Above, versions of the 10gen SDK currently available.

Other open source cloud computing platforms include Toronto's Enomaly and UC Santa Barbara's Eucalyptus. There's a good round-up of coverage on this topic over at Gigaom.

It was a big party. Amazon and Google were also invited. The message - all aligned with Salesforce.com in their quest to be the dominant Cloud Computing platform for business.

LinkedIn was not at the party. The announcement of Force.com for Facebook, which you can see here, was illustrated with recruiting applications, which is LinkedIn's primary domain. This was designed to show that companies, i.e. the Salesforce.com customer base, could build Force.com applications and deploy them on Facebook.

Sheryl Sandberg told us why we should bother - 120m users on Facebook, 30m joined in the last 3 months (the same number that took them their first 3 years to build).

Oh, and Microsoft was not invited either. In any case they might have got upset at all the jokes about Sharepoint that Benioff used whenever he wanted to play to the gallery.

Benioff told a compelling big picture story that computing has gone through two waves, from mainframe to PC client server and that now we are in the third wave of Cloud Computing. Salesforce.com got into that game early and have the clout and the drive to imagine being the number one player in Cloud Computing for business - assuming that Google will be the number one for consumer.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

No one is spared by "the consultant":

"No one knows what is going on. Not even Gartner. Especially Gartner."

"CloudCamp is just a bunch of vendors getting pissed, eating pizza and comparing the size of their case studies."

"And what is this about Microsoft. They are considered to be one of the four big cloud providers and they are about as cloudy as Steve Ballmer is cool."

It goes on. it does strike a chord. The hype about cloud computing is so ripe for satire. Almost as much as social media - which apparently was the inspiration for this sketch.

The cloud consultant makes his point pretty well about the state of the cloud computing market. Hardly anyone is making any money. Have we not seen this before in our world of over charged tech enthusiasm?

In the meantime, according to the consultant, the only ones making a dime (barely) on cloud computing are a bookseller and a search engine.

"And maybe Salesforce," the consultant says. "And they were cloud before cloud was cloud." ;)

That is the expectation of about 39% of financial services CIOs worldwide, according to the survey. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 44% of CIOs for banking firms expect that more than half of their institutions' transactions will take place via infrastructure that lives in the cloud, and 33% expect most of them will be processed using some type of SaaS application.

Let the Machines Do What They Do Best, So People Can Focus Elsewhere

"As banks progressively replace people in the value chain with algorithmic operations (AOs) to run processes and make decisions, their intellectual property increasingly resides in these algorithms," reads a post on Gartner's blog. "The value of people is not in running operations but in improving the AOs."

It's this type of efficiency and operational enhancement that can drive what Gartner calls "creative destruction" within the banking industry.

As Gartner Managing Vice President Peter Redshaw summed it up, "Successful new cloud services can displace the existing and dominant process for design, distribution or transacting in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them."

To us, this looks like a great way to introduce students to cloud computing, and, as far as we are concerned, the more students get access to this technology, the better. We also like Amazon's idea to grant researchers access to its services, as this can mean significant cost reductions for many academic projects, which, given the current economic climate, can only be a good thing as well - and, of course, it will also introduce these researchers to the potential of cloud computing.

Practice Fusion currently has "over 18,000 users," which would appear to be a big increase on the 1,300 medical professionals they had one year ago. The product originally launched in November of 2007, so it's nearly two years old now.

Is Cloud Computing Suitable for Healthcare?

A post on the Practice Fusion blog today asks the question: is "cloud computing" right for health IT? We reported earlier this week that cloud computing is infiltrating virtually every corner of technology right now, but it still has dangers. We noted the recent hacking of Google Docs to steal internal Twitter documents, as one recent high profile example (high profile because the stolen documents were subsequently emailed to some news outlets, some of whom published the 'hot' docs).

However despite these risks Practice Fusion claims that the cost benefits of cloud computing in healthcare are significant, particularly in its EMR niche:

"Cost and poor usability have been cited as the biggest obstacles to adoption of health IT - especially Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems - and has resulted in problematically-low EHR adoption rates. Eliminating this cost, and the IT maintenance burdens that are often beyond the reach of small medical practices, clearly removes these significant roadblocks to EHR adoption."

Security and safety is of course the big potentially negative issue with cloud computing. But Practice Fusion points to several use cases where it says that cloud computing has advantages over desktop apps: disaster-recovery, hacks (because "SaaS providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford"), and privacy. All of those points come down to the premise that a cloud computing / SaaS specialist, such as Practice Fusion, has more expertise, more resources, and is generally better able to deliver those safety and security requirements.

That all sounds great in theory, however every case like the Twitter stolen documents one serves to undermine that argument. And there are just too many such cases right now.

Nevertheless, we're sure that over time cloud computing will become ever more secure. It's clear that Practice Fusion is a young company that is growing well. With Salesforce.com on its side too now, the future looks secure for them.

Kundra's lasting legacy for federal IT is his "25-point plan." His goal was to cut back on U.S. IT spending by making the process more efficient and implementing new technologies, such as cloud computing. Kundra oversaw a budget of nearly $80 billion while the U.S. CIO.

Before moving up to the White House, Kundra was the CIO of the District of Columbia under Mayor Adrian Fenty and previous to that the secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Kundra will be a good fit for Salesforce. As the EVP for emerging markets, there are few people more qualified to spread the word of cloud computing and its cost benefits than Kundra. He was, in concert with former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, one of the biggest drivers of NASA's Nebula cloud computing system that became the foundation for OpenStack.

Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce in a press release. "His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise."

Slicehost

Slicehost was founded two years ago and quickly became one of the more popular cloud computing and hosting companies on the Internet. Slicehost's offering are mostly complimentary to Rackspace's services and Slicehost expects to integrate Rackspace's new CloudFiles storage solution in the near future.

Slicehost also announced a number of new features, including the availability of larger 'slices' and lower prices for its high-end offerings.

JungleDisk

By acquiring JungleDisk, Rackspace is now supported by one of the most popular online backup and file storage solutions. Rackspace is planning to integrate JungleDisk into all its products, but it will also continue to support S3.

Challenging Amazon

With these new services, Rackspace is directly competing with Amazon's Web services. The JungleDisk acquisition and the new cloud storage services go up against Amazon's S3, while the Slicehost acquisition competes directly with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

Thanks to its established user base, Rackspace is in a good position to challenge Amazon's cloud computing services and, if anything, it is good to see that the competition in this space is heating up.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a RWW sponsor.

Greenpeace is calling attention to a central flaw in the duality of technology - its ability to help the world while, at the same time, running off the same old, dirty, polluting power sources that harm it.

The report highlights Facebook's recent commissioning of a data center in Oregon, which is powered primarily by coal, "the United States' largest source of greenhouse gas emissions." Yahoo!, on the other hand, "chose to build a data centre outside Buffalo, New York, that is powered by energy from a hydroelectric plant - dramatically decreasing its carbon footprint." Google, it notes, has been "recently approved as a regulated wholesale buyer and seller of electricity", meaning any power it creates that it cannot use it can sell back to the power companies.

Greenpeace is using statistics from Smart 2020, a 2008 study that found that changes within the ICT sector could reduce "15% of business as usual emissions". As a result of rapid expansion in places like India and China, "demand for ICT services will quadruple by 2020".

The release of the report comes just days before Apple's release of the iPad, a device that will assuredly run off cloud-based services, and just weeks after Microsoft said it was betting the farm on the cloud.

For the six universities involved in the project, that means access to a small scale version of the type of data center that runs Google's own search engine and applications on which to teach students about cloud computing. Distributed computing works by creating clusters of commodity hardware that run on an interconnected grid and allow web applications to scale without the need for expensive, large-scale server farms.

"This project combines IBM's historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google's complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters," said Samuel J. Palmisano, chairman, president and chief executive officer of IBM in a press release. "We're aiming to train tomorrow's programmers to write software that can support a tidal wave of global Web growth and trillions of secure transactions every day."

Google and IBM are betting that cloud computing will continue to be important on the web and by training future engineers on their tools they can ensure themselves access to the top minds in the field.