ReadWriteWeb

Way back in 1984, a company called Applied Business Technology Corp. produced a partly open source project management tool called Open Workbench. After it became part of a company called Niku in 2000, its resource management features had become leveraged for use for inventory of business applications. Big businesses - especially ones formed through mergers and acquisitions - ended up with more software than they knew what to do with.

By the time the former Computer Associates - now just CA Technologies - acquired Niku and made it into its Clarity division, application portfolio management had become one of Niku's top selling points. This morning, as Clarity now officially enters version 13, it's being offered for the first time as a service. But even with a cloud-based option, Clarity should not be thought of specifically as a cloud migration tool for business resources, but rather as a tool for first evaluating whether such a migration is necessary. This from CA's own vice president for marketing, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb.

Yesterday TrackVia released some surprising survey results here about how frustrated customers are with their computer experience. What is surprising is how low the numbers were:

• More than 17% admitted they were fed up enough that they would consider quitting their jobs over bad software,
  
• 29% said that they wasted from one to three hours a month on their software's issues,
  
• 60% have yelled at their computers at least once, and
  
• 9% said that their software helped them be as productive as possible.
  

This is a new one on me. I've heard of tree huggers, but Patrick Thibodeau's piece in ComputerWorld today is the first time I've run into server hugger. What's a server hugger, you ask?

According to Thibodeau, it's a term coined by Forrester analyst James Staten, for IT folks who "have significant concerns about their ongoing value to the company if they don't run [IT systems] themselves." Does the term fit, or is it perhaps a wee bit early to be labeling IT folks who haven't put all their eggs in the cloud basket?

When you are as large as CA Technologies, you typically announce a bunch of new products (as we covered this past July) and especially around its annual CA World conference that is being held in Vegas this week. Today CA announced two new identity and access management cloud security services IdentifyMinder and FedMinder; the Cloud 360 process for cloud management; and Cloud Commons Marketplace and Developer Studio for buying and selling cloud-based development projects. Let's look at each one in more detail.

The financial services industry is warming up to the idea of using the cloud for some of its critical computing needs. More than half of bank transactions will be supported by cloud-based infrastructure and software by 2015, according to a recent report from Gartner.

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.

There's a new one born every minute. I don't mean the P.T. Barnum quote, I mean acronym. Today it seems to be Infrastructure-as-a-Platform (IaaP), to join all the other "as a" acronyms that are difficult to keep straight. If technology could just hold still for a few years, everybody could get up to speed on all the terminology. Alas, that's not going to happen anytime soon. If you're new, or new-ish, to cloud services you're probably a bit muddy on what all the different "-as-a-Service" terms are. Want to know your SaaS from your PaaS and your IaaS?

There are some whose definition of cloud computing includes by rule, not by option, the capability to provision additional resources such as storage and processing into an expanding pool, without regard to brand, format, or protocol. That isn't exactly what we're seeing today from IBM, which many will recall was able to bend "grid computing" toward its center of gravity as well.

The new universe of IBM cloud services is covered in a layer of semantic goo. Swimming through it can be suffocating, so instead of replicating it here, we've surgically extracted the core elements of today's multiple announcements, and we present them here all clean and free of metaphor.

Many small businesses don't have much depth when it comes to IT support, and Symantec's Norton division is here to help with its first 24/7 online help desk.

What can you call them about? A lot of different problems: virus infections, of course, but also solving network connection issues, general PC tuneups, hooking up a printer or a scanner, and general consultative help. Yes, there are lots of local VARs that offer this service, but the Norton name carries a certain cachet. (For those of you too young to remember, Peter Norton pictured above, was an early utility software pioneer, and is now a patron of the arts.)

Cisco announced today that collaboration tools vendor Versly.com is now part of its ever-growing family. Versly hasn't yet had a real product, but you can apply for a chance to be in its closed beta on their site.

Versly's ten employees will be integrated into Cisco Collaboration Software Group that also includes its WebEx, Jabber and Quad product lines. It will be offered as a separate service, but Cisco will eventually integrate its features into these three existing services designed for enterprise customers, perhaps as early as 2012. So comment streams, detecting whether someone is actually inside a document at any given moment, and jointly editing documents will all be parts of Cisco's collaboration tools eventually.

An article by Derek Singleton on the blog for Software Advice talks about five things that he sees makes SaaS unique, including the talent draw of cloud companies, the ability to scale up operations more smoothly, the way cloud software is being purchased and consumed and other reasons.

While Singleton makes a lot of sense - and I do like the folks on Software Advice and think they are generally smart guys - he is missing a few major drawbacks with SaaS that are holding things back for better enterprise adoption.