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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.

John Hagel, perhaps best known for his book The Only Sustainable Edge, has been one of the leading strategic thinkers for decades. Recently, as Co-Chair of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, he unveiled the Shift Index. This is a fascinating way to look at the economy and goes well beyond the traditional GDP and employment measures. Have a strong cup of coffee before reading or listening to this interview. This is important for enterprises as they think about the big picture related to social media, changing demographics, and increased global competition. It is also valuable for enterprise software vendors as they seek to articulate the value of their products to these clients.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I asked all of the vendors, "SaaS or on-premise?" The assumption, because this conference was all about modern 2.0 stuff, was that everyone would say, "SaaS, of course."

Wrong. At least 50% of the vendors were deploying primarily on premise. Even some of the pure SaaS crowd would admit to an occasional on-premise deployment. Anecdotally, even some of those who say they are pure SaaS will deploy on premise quietly. Why are enterprise customers telling vendors that they want on-premise deployment?

Once a company gains widespread popularity, scaling is often its biggest problem. Public familiarity with the Twitter Fail Whale is our proof. To keep up with the pace of demand, many companies including Twitter have found unique and inexpensive ways to manage consumers transactions. One such solution, Puppet, just earned Reductive Labs a $2 million dollar Series A round with True Ventures.

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These are glorious days for networking. The social Web is richer and wider than ever before, and it offers a myriad of services and platforms to help us connect with each other, share our likes and dislikes, etc. Some people even say that too many such services exist, that many of them will plunge in dot-com bubble-like style.

Corporations know that their relationships with customers are drastically changing as a result of the new capabilities made possible by Web 2.0 and social media. Customers increasingly expect to engage with brands instantaneously and satisfactorily. They no longer tolerate long delays in response, live operators buried down the 1-800-line call tree, or the ever-mounting irrelevant spam.

Gradually, but extremely well, customers are learning to sound their voices for everyone to hear. Gone are the days when a customer needed to write a letter to an anonymous clerk at a random PO box address, leaving response to chance and corrective action to a Hanukkah miracle. Customers today can sound their likes and dislikes at anytime across multiple media, uncensored: no smart nephew, neighbor with a printer, or attorney needed.

If you're about to deploy Google Apps for your business, today is your lucky day. This morning, an official site dedicated to Google Apps Deployment for Enterprise was unveiled.

Broken down into deployment planning and user adoption, the new resource is basically a treasure-trove of information on rolling out Google Apps in your business. It's targeted specifically at larger organizations; for deployments of less-than 100 users, Google recommends their usual "Getting Started" guide. In the wake of yesterday's announcement of syncing with Microsoft Outlook, this is just one more reason why Google is getting serious about pushing Apps into larger enterprise deployments.

We recently spoke with Claudia Fan Munce of IBM's Venture Capital Group. IBM doesn't invest equity in startups; rather, this small group within IBM works with 120 of the world's leading VCs to give their startups access to IBM technology and, more importantly, IBM's customers in 170 countries. Since forming in 2001, the IBM Venture Capital Group has nurtured close to 1400 of these relationships. So, it is (1) oriented around later-stage ventures, and (2) focused more on B2B and enterprise ventures than consumer ones.

Now that the Palm Pre has seen its first days in the sun, Sprint is offering a new mobile broadband plan for business users, offering 500 MB of data per month for $40.

Called the Connection Plan for Corporate Liable accounts, it appears that Sprint's enterprise plan is more data for the price than either Verizon or AT&T.

Social networks are becoming a default way for many employees to stay in touch with friends, colleagues, and business associates, but according to a new poll by the anti-virus firm Sophos, 63% of system administrators worry that employees who share too much personal information on social networking sites will put their company's IT infrastructure at risk. A quarter of these businesses also report that they have been the victim of spam, phishing, and malware attacks via sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

Because Enterprise 2.0 is a maturing space, there are many competing sources online for advice and opinion. It's sometimes difficult to ascertain who's who and whether their opinion is reliable and credible. I'll be occasionally highlighting voices in the community who've made a significant contribution to moving the Enterprise 2.0 discussion forward, although they may not be well known in a certain geography or technology discipline.

Whenever you buy an airline ticket or book a hotel room these days, chances are that a good part of that transaction will run through Sabre's network. Sabre is one of the world's largest suppliers of technology solutions for the airline and travel industry. What you may not be aware of, however, is that Sabre has made open-source software a cornerstone of its technology strategy. Sabre already relies on a number of open-source projects to handle thousands of transactions every second, and today, Sabre and Progress FUSE announced a new partnership that will make a number of FUSE's open-source offerings a cornerstone of Sabre's technology.

The Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum has just released their 2009 industry report and the topic is the top Web 2.0 security threats. Designed to serve as a guideline for assessing the risk involved with using Web 2.0 tools in the workplace, the document is intended to read by anyone considering the introduction of Web 2.0 technology into their workplace. The document doesn't name technologies or companies that in and of themselves are risky, but rather looks at the types of vulnerabilities that Web 2.0 can bring to a business environment.

Businesses and established organizations are vastly different environments than the Web 2.0 social networking-centric universe. Where Web 2.0 is all about sharing information and engaging in two-way conversations, the enterprise concerns itself, in part, with individuals who are guarded with information and an organizational structure that disseminates information in top-down fashion. From my experience of evangelizing the benefits of social media at a mid-sized civil engineering company, I have learned many lessons on how the enterprise regards and judges social media.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at Google's product line adjustments, explain why you should jailbreak your iPhone, analyze the world of Enterprise RSS, and tell you how to build a Social Media 'cheat sheet' for virtually any topic. Also we review the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

Google tonight announced a reseller and accreditation program for Google Apps. Resellers, after being trained by Google, can now market, support, and customize Google Apps Premier Edition for their customers. Resellers will get training and support from Google, as well as tools for sales, marketing, and integrating Google Apps into their customers' existing architectures. Google has already rolled out a pilot of this program to more than 50 partners worldwide.

It's with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead. Two years ago there were three major players offering software that delivered information to the computers of business users via RSS. Today it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.

A smattering of employees in big companies are using the free consumer app Google Reader, a paltry substitute for a business class RSS reader, and the rest of the business world is apparently satisfied to get information whenever they happen to stumble over it. It's insane - a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.

VMware Brings Virtualization to Mobile Phones

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

The cyn.in desktop client from a company called Cynapse is a new application that brings microblogging to the corporate desktop. Powered by Adobe AIR, the client is intended to improve collaboration between teams through its real-time "Activity Stream" of events which makes communication quick and easy.

Enterprise adoption of cloud computing, SaaS, and social media (whatever you want to call it) is accelerating. This is a healthy market, in which vendors are doing well in a tough economy. As we near the end of a year that will go down in history with the words "meltdown," "panic," "crisis," and "depression" attached, it is time to celebrate the winners in this market, enterprise-focused web products that are already doing well and poised for even greater success in 2009. And if these products excite you, we invite you to subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise Channel.