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."

The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. "An empire of robots," the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?

A cynical, apocalyptic view of that plan to build "an empire of robots" is easy to imagine. If Foxconn builds 1 million robot workers, that will likely double the number of robot workers on the planet today. I want to consider a potential upside to all this; with regard to human freedom, creativity and opportunities for innovation in learning systems and technology.

But the robotization of the workforce does have clear risks. Enterprise 2.0 forefather Andrew McAfee is the co-author of a new book called Race Against the Machine. He put it this way in an interview with Steven Cherry at IEEE Spectrum earlier this month:

..it is possible for some people to be left behind, even as productivity surges ahead and even as our society as a whole benefits. There is no economic law that says that everyone has to share in those benefits equally, and when we looked around we started to see a lot of people--and particularly a lot of workers in the economy, people who wanted to offer their labor to the economy--we saw a lot of people being left behind as the machine races ahead.

McAfee is concerned that this could lead to a violation of the social contract and widespread social unrest. On some level, this definitely makes sense. The situation may be vastly understated and need of more human compassion. McAfee:

"...the social contract has been something like, If you are willing to work, there will be a job waiting for you. And we've done a fairly good job with that social contract, not a perfect job obviously, but pretty good. When I hear a lot of the protesters talk, I get the impression that they believe that social contract is fraying. When we looked at the data, we came to the same conclusion.

What does that mean in an era where there is less and less demand for unskilled labor, though?

Maybe We Can Make Some Great Lemonade

Whether due to robots or due to an increasingly competitive and complex world, it seems apparent that there is a growing imperative for human workers to move up the value chain - to develop and more widely distribute the skills to perform more skilled, creative work.

That's not good news for humans.

Parents have been telling their children for years now that computers are going to change the world and young people need to develop skills to offer in the marketplace.

It may soon come to the point, if it hasn't already, where the supply of and demand for skilled labor become imbalanced enough that the market value of skill building shoots through the roof.

Human Capital Acquisition and Management, otherwise known as training people and keeping track of the skills available in your organization, is an increasingly potent field.

I can't stop thinking about SAP's acquisition of Human Capital Management firm SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion this month. That ten year old company is one of many firms focused on building, retaining, optimizing and managing skills in the workforce.

If an empire of robots eliminates a substantial amount of the demand for unskilled human labor, that may mean that both companies and individuals have a strong economic incentive in moving people from low-level jobs where they have to be told exactly what to do and how to do it, into higher-functioning roles at work where they can be told simply what needs to be accomplished, then be capable of accomplishing it in whatever ways make the most sense.

Systems that help optimize that learning process would then confer a powerful competitive advantage. Successfactors is huge. Rypple, a small player in the same market, was just acquired by Salesforce, which says it is now building out a new product suite in Human Capital Management called SuccessForce. WorkDay has an IPO pending; analyst Josh Bresin calls its software "amazing".

That sounds to me like a world in which humans get to learn new skills as fast as competitive cloud services can train them on those skills. Then they can act as creatively and intelligently as they can, having been empowered with new forms of Human Capital.

Including work in creative use of cloud services and robots. Have you seen the new social network for robots, MyRobots.com, for example? Rather than worry about having robots and machines doing the things we used to do, why not focus on learning how to work with the robot and machine cloud layer of data and functionality?

The ability to move from being told explicitly what to do into a role where you're told generally what needs to get done is not just an economic change - it's a change of conditions for the human spirit.

There are certainly equity, justice, privacy and other issues that need to be figured out. But it's not all bad news - far from it.

If robot workers can in fact be treated as tools for a human workforce that is effectively moved up the value chain, using services from an increasingly competitive Human Capital Management sector to make that shift, then I think the end result is win-win. Less unskilled labor, more support for better systems for teaching and learning. More fruit of skilled labor in the future.

Will it work that way? We'll see. That seems a possible trajectory for the future.

Photo: Menace From The Land Before Color, by JD Hancock

Certainly 2011 was dramatically different from 2010 for businesses for one critical reason: In a very short time, suddenly true scalability for every IT service appeared within their reach. A market that was almost non-existent by the end of last year, has grown past what many analysts would consider the point of adolescence, with the shakeout subsiding and brand dropouts declining. Someone should remind these cloud service folks there's a recession going on.

Not every candidate for this list offers its own cloud platform; we considered services that are offered on others' cloud platforms. And we considered the platforms on which they're offered, too, if they presented a value-add that made them unique. Beta services were not eligible; we stuck with general availability only.

10. Xeround. This service, which premiered in late 2010, quite easily (judging from customers' comments) deploys new or existing MySQL databases on cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and Heroku. Rather than just shoving off databases into the cloud space, Xeround manages storage on the back end with built-in scalability.

The back-end storage, whose configuration is kept transparent from the user, is managed by a homegrown system that scales itself by means of virtual partitioning as opposed to sharding. Each partition is maintained on independent nodes using shared-nothing architecture (meaning, no single point of failure leads to cascading node elimination). Your database application never sees the partitioning take place, and isn't even involved; and scaling takes place with the goal of zero downtime - which thus far appears to have been achieved.

Usually a company's own predictions for the coming year are rather self-serving, so Xeround's #1 event for 2012 may come as something of a shock: "The Cloud will disappear," writes Xeround's Itamar Haber, "not in the sense that it will be gone (far from it) but rather in that that it will become all-encompassing and omnipresent. We will no longer see The Cloud as a trend or even an alternate model for using compute resources - it will become transparent as it will be the de facto default means of choice for nearly all IT-backed projects across industry sectors." I guess that makes this the last year for this Top 10 list as well, eh?

9. Bime might not have qualified as a cloud service per se, except for the clever way it serves as storage for business intelligence. It's not a particularly sophisticated data store, but it doesn't have to be for its main purpose: visualizing and analyzing data from large databases. Many businesses used to rely on exporting data to Excel for this purpose, in what often became one of the clumsier exercises in database versioning.

Bime Analytics makes itself visible to the world through interesting, if often fairly trivial, sample renderings of data that's fascinating to someone. My daughter, for example, will find interesting this "data cloud"-style subdivision (above) of the various villains that appeared in Doctor Who, organized by relative area in proportion with their appearances throughout the entire franchise history, and organized in blocks by the year of their first episode. It's an example of the Bime visualization engine putting itself through its paces using innocuous data (though I gather the Sontarans could start a cosmic war to avoid being sublimated by the Cybermen).

Essentially, Bime is a data visualization firm, which ordinarily would render it just an app. What makes Bime's business model not only cloud-centric but also more viable are two things: 1) If you're going to visualize your own data, you need a way to get it into the system. So Bime can afford to charge a premium for storage ($60/month for the first gigabyte, $120/month for up to 10 GB) since what you'll really be using it for anyway is visualization. Imagine paying $60 a month for something that only billed itself as a graphics app. 2) As my friend and colleague Pam Baker showed us last August, Bime offers an API for developers to build their own apps that utilize the visualization functionality, that in turn uses the data you're paying Bime a premium to store for you. It is an excellent business concept, and a way to use cloud resources to twist an otherwise point-and-shoot SaaS app into a viable business.

8. Okta. Almost four years ago, this service was founded with the notion of providing identity federation for a handful of familiar SaaS apps like Google Apps and online services like Facebook. Well, Facebook wants to be a major player in the identity game in its own right. Besides, simply federating single-sign-on access to an expanding list of players isn't an exciting business model when that number of players begins to dwindle.

So earlier this year, as David Strom told you in August, Okta put a new cloud-style spin on its service: In adding a new layer of Active Directory integration, it made itself into a kind of all-purpose AD app. Your single sign-on takes place through this app, rather than through some complex federation service on-premise. And because all the users in a business are checking in through one place, Okta becomes the dashboard for delegating privileges and permissions to those users. Through Active Directory, the same password that enables users to enter the network in the first place, logs them onto Okta as well.

Last year at this time, developers and administrators alike were in a quandary over how to manage the identities that users must assume in order to access multiple applications, both on-premise and through the cloud. Okta is not yet the total solution to this problem, but the fact that it has taken a serious bite out of the problem in so short a time points to the possibility of a cloud-based solution to the broader identity management problem.

Next page: Service-as-a-service...

7. PubNub. One of the hilarious fallacies of "walled garden" service architectures is the illusion of exclusivity. By making users sign an agreement explaining exactly how they must use their services, complete with terms of use, carriers and service providers are betting that they'll presume they can't find some way to utilize the same (or better) functions some other way.

PubNub is clearly a different way, and the service it provides is one that many users may have thought they were prohibited from doing themselves: self-service push notification. If you're building an app that needs the capability to alert the user, through his operating system (PC or smartphone), PubNub provides you with a pair of dirt-simple API calls. You implement one in the app that will be listening to your PubNub channel for alerts - this is the subscribe part of the operation. The other for the server side, simply to send text alerts through that channel. For the most part, save for a half-page of syntax, that is the instruction manual.

Through the pay-as-you-go scheme, users pay 1/100 of one cent for each alert sent or received. Of course, with fully deployed apps on a global scale, you could be racking up charges fairly quickly, so alternately PubNub offers paid-in-advance service tiers beginning at $129.99 per month for 1 million alerts per day. The service is so straightforward that it's now being used for active notifications for real-time gaming, as well as for quick-and-dirty chat rooms.

6. SendGrid. Though Salesforce's Marc Benioff has publicly proclaimed e-mail "dead" (along with Microsoft and something he calls "the false cloud," which bears a curiously red tint to it), e-mail is actually far from dead. If you look at the colossal size of my own inbox, you might proclaim it "resting," but it's not dead.

SendGrid (a frequent sponsor of ReadWriteWeb) is an e-mail distribution service for individuals and companies that utilizes a cloud pricing model, with the idea that you're paying for outgoing bandwidth (measured in messages sent). Its value-add is that it sends marketing e-mails systematically, in a deliberate effort to avoid being tagged by e-mail services as a spammer. It calls its strategy "IP address warming," where all addresses start cold and work their way gradually towards sending higher volumes, as servers establish reputations for them. So while SendGrid's pricing is based on scale, it actively encourages customers to start at the bottom, spacing out monthly distributions of newsletters throughout the month rather than all on the same day.

"Deliverability is a secret crisis facing any business that relies on e-mail communications," reads a recent SendGrid white paper (PDF available here). "Most companies don't think about deliverability until they have a major issue where thousands or in some cases millions of e-mails fail to arrive. People assume that an e-mail is delivered if they don't receive a bounce notification. The reality is very different: 20% of commercial e-mail sent never arrives as intended. If you're an online business you need to take steps today to increase the reliability of your e-mail communications."

5. Twilio. As many of our long-time readers are well aware, Twilio is essentially a telecommunications back end whose API functions may be called by any app. It's like a chassis for Skype without the baggage of Skype. Granted, Twilio has been growing at a steady pace. But last July, it added what history may record as its breakthrough feature: a JavaScript SDK. This makes a Twilio client available directly from a Web browser, so you can have direct phone communications inside your browser app, as well as your stand-alone app.

From here, the service started building an ecosystem - which may have just become the necessary ingredient for any cloud service to be competitive going into 2012. In Twilio's case, as Dan Rowinski reported in September, the service announced it's partnering with venture capitalists to fund the development and deployment of an entire community of apps that just happen to communicate over Twilio's platform. As Rowinski wrote, "By moving communications to the cloud and providing pay-as-you-go billing that does not hang over the developer's head, Twilio has a chance to grow rapidly in both the consumer app development community and the enterprise."

As private developer Patrick McKenzie recently put it, "I think Twilio is, far and away, the most exciting technology I've ever worked with... Smartphones aren't smart because of anything on the phones themselves, they're smart because they speak HTTP and thus get always-on access to a universe of applications which are improving constantly. Twilio radically reduces the amount of hardware support a phone needs to speak HTTP - it retroactively upgrades every phone in the world to do so. After that, all you need is the application logic."

4. MongoHQ. In politics of late, when left with few or no other options to slam an opponent, the one way to make a charge stick is to make it so ludicrous or so audacious that folks will conclude it has to be true to have been made in the first place. (For more, see "Kerry, Sen. John.") So you have to wonder how it is that MongoDB made the news recently for having been the subject of a hugely popular discussion thread (to use the phrase loosely) on Hacker News. Here is the lead post for that thread, in its entirety: "Don't use MongoDB." (A lot of research done there.)

Our Joe Brockmeier looked into the matter, and found direct evidence of substance somewhat lacking. MongoDB, by the way, is a scalable data store for loosely structured (as opposed to unstructured) data using MySQL. MongoHQ, which made our list this year, is effectively the monetization engine for MongoDB, making the database platform accessible to literally anyone on self-service terms.

As a developer, you only pay for MongoHQ once your storage size scales up to 256 MB - meaning, once your database becomes legitimately used by others. Large database instances are served up at $49 for 5 GB, although for high availability, apps developers may choose instead to pay $149 per month for a replica set, which includes full failover.

Next page: Yop.

3. Radian6. Back in 2009, RWW's Marshall Kirkpatrick examined Radian6 for the first time - a kind of social media dashboard offering live heuristics for the instances that certain terms (especially brand names) get mentioned on social services like Twitter. At the time, it looked like an interesting curiosity, especially for people whose hobbies are to "keep score at home." What was it really for? A Radian6 product manager told Marshall that the direction for the product was "adding CRM."

Maybe someone at Salesforce.com was using Radian6 at that very moment. Though it might not have seemed so at the time, Salesforce's acquisition of Radian6 ended up being one of the most important enterprise news stories of the year. If anyone has proven it knows how to avoid burying an acquired product under the rug, it's Salesforce. Now the product has become a genuine platform, with apps being built around it and distributed on Salesforce App Exchange.

Now, Radian6 is more than just a dashboard for the curious. Social marketing specialists can utilize the tool to alert them when online chatter around a certain topic has reached a critical threshold. It can trigger actions en masse, such as couponing individuals who seed positive comments on a product. And its instantaneous demographics that align tweeters and Facebook users with their respective market segments, has already crossed the borderline into scary territory.

2. Hortonworks Hadoop. It wasn't quite two years ago when Hadoop was essentially a side project at Yahoo, incorporating some code from a side project at Google. Today (although it's a terribly mixed metaphor) the Hadoop elephant has leap-frogged over high-availability database projects at Oracle and Microsoft to become the de facto solution for hosting big data in parallel.

It gets confusing when an open source project is stewarded by more than one commercial provider, as our Joe Brockmeier reported in October. The Yahoo engineers largely responsible for its creation have formed Hortonworks, and it is they who launched the Hadoop cloud platform in November. Now, with the assistance of commercial partners such as Informatica, developers can deploy extraordinarily large data sets in a cloud configuration with high reliability - much more reliable than the hardware it runs on.

"Hadoop was built from the bottom up to be built on very low-cost commodity hardware," Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschweiler told RWW in October. "It's built with the assumption that the hardware it's running on will break, and that it must continue to work even if the hardware breaks." Which implies a lot, given that one of the other biggest enterprise cloud news stories of the year was Hortonworks' partnership with Microsoft to bring Hadoop into Windows Server, possibly as a role for System Center.

1. Heroku. In little more than a year, the service that had been considered the pioneer platform-as-a-service, Microsoft Windows Azure, was left in the dust as an also-ran by yet another Salesforce acquisition.

Heroku quite literally tries to fill the large, and widening, void left over when computers stopped including built-in BASIC interpreters. Rather than presenting itself as a battery of stand-alone servers built for doing scheduled jobs on complex agendas, Heroku is a managed code interpreter for a growing bouquet of languages, some of which (like Clojure and Scala) are only just now entering the common vernacular. Such languages are clearly better suited for quick deployment of Web-based functionality than the dependency-heavy C++, C#, and Visual Basic which comprise the brunt of the .NET languages Microsoft supports in Azure.

What's more, the Heroku add-ons ecosystem is already in full bloom, even with support for apps and services like MongoHQ that utilize cloud platforms other than Heroku itself. Last October, Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian told me that his goal for the service is simply to enable developers to push code to the cloud using git push and have it run. There's no agenda for the promotion of any single language platform (including Ruby on Rails, on which the service was founded, and whose creator is now a Heroku employee). "We differentiate ourselves at the level of our cloud app platform, rather than at the level of languages and frameworks," Sebastian said, "because we believe that openness is an important principle in our industry. It's in our blood."

Well, the enterprise cloud is in our blood now, too. And at this rate, it will probably be in our bones and muscles before the end of 2012.

Still as yet unreported, though? It appears that Palo Alto based Etacts isn't the only YCombinator-incubated email add-on startup that Salesforce has acquired today. San Francisco's EmailOracle, a smaller startup that lets users track when individual recipients have opened emails you send to them, also announced today that it's closing down. That site used the exact same language in its announcement that Etacts did, too. In other words, welcome to Salesforce, teams Etacts and EmailOracle. Update: TechCrunch reporter Jason Kincaid responds in comments with a theory that these may in fact be the same company. While we don't know whether that's true or not, it doesn't seem unlikely given the way YCombinator has been known to tell founders that they like their people, but that they need a different product. We'll update this post when we find out for sure. Further update: Turns out the two companies sit on the same server.

When EmailOracle launched, many people questioned whether it would work: the service relies on an image pixel being displayed in an opened email and thus reporting back to the EmailOracle server that the mail had been clicked. What about the default mode of blocking images in emails, people asked? What about AdBlock plug-ins, which also blocked this service? Some argued that while email open rates were roughly helpful when analyzed over a large quantity of emails, it was too risky to rely on such a system for tracking a single email.

Perhaps that's why Etacts raised money from a list of rock-star developers and EmailOracle only listed YCombinator as its backing. They say that investors deliver more value in the form of advice and introductions to other powerful people than they do from simple cash - it looks like the EmailOracle team probably benefitted greatly from its YCombinator connections, when Salesforce came knocking for email CRM-type startups. (It's widely discussed that Salesforce may acquire social stream reader Seesmic as well, so stay tuned for that. Seesmic is not associated with YCombinator.)

What does this mean for users? It may be good news for Salesforce customers but not everyone is excited. "The hunt for a replacement tool is on, then," said blogger and EmailOracle fan Paul Miller. "I'm not implementing all of Salesforce just to know when it's time to nudge someone I sent an email to."

While that may be true, we think there are a few other things to consider before attempting at making your machine a Java-free runtime environment.

"Java has a less-than-stellar security record. There's actually quite a bit of Java malware out there, generally relying on patched vulnerabilities, as old versions of Java are common on user systems," he wrote when he started the experiment last month.

The biggest issue he ran into, it seems, was actually removing Java itself, which appears to install itself in numerous places throughout your system.

Java likes it on your PC and really doesn't want to let go. Even after you uninstall all the versions listed in your Add/Remove you may find Java components installed in web browsers. Do about:plugins on Firefox or Google Chrome. Do you see Java entries there? I thought so. You may also see plugins from other programs you thought you uninstalled. Do the same for Tools-Manage Add-ons in Internet Explorer. I suppose the uninstallers don't necessarily bother with these browser components. After you disable them in Firefox and/or Chrome, you can delete these plugins by deleting their program files in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins\ or wherever Firefox is installed.

Seltzer notes that the Wall Street Journal uses it in certain cases and some banking websites he ran into also use it, but otherwise it was pretty much useless. He warns that, before getting rid of Java yourself, "go through your bookmarks and maybe the last week or so of history and look for sites you use that might use Java ".

Beyond websites that still use Java, which are few and far between and have mostly been replaced by Adobe Flash, there are still some apps out there that use Java and the Java Runtime Environment - apps that some of you geeky, business types might be running.

Our favorite non-cloud alternative to Microsoft Office, Open Office, for example, still relies on the JRE to function properly. As does one of the ReadWriteWeb team's favorite website traffic analysis tools, Woopra.

In batting the idea around, Alex Williams, our enterprise editor, noted that a large number of enterprise solutions still rely on Java. Vmware, for example, is introducing platforms to work with both Salesforce and Google that depend on Java to operate. In general, a lot of companies still use Java internally for custom solutions and eradicating it from your machine could stir up some issues.

Were it not for Open Office and Woopra, we might take the plunge, but those are two programs we certainly don't want to give up. For now, we'll just make sure to say "yes" when Java asks us if we want to install the latest update.

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

The nine patents that Microsoft holds Salesforce to have broken are the following.

• Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data
• System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu
• Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display
• Automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications
• Aggregation of system settings into objects
• Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
• Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
• Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer
• System and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network

The filing requests triple damages and a permanent injunction against Salesforce's continued alleged use of the patents.

We have been and may in the future be sued by third parties for alleged infringement of their proprietary rights.

In an SEC filing in January, Salesforce acknowledged the interest of a company that appears to be Microsoft.

"The software and Internet industries are characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, trademarks and copyrights and by frequent litigation based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. We have received in the past and may receive in the future communications from third parties claiming that we have infringed on the intellectual property rights of others. During fiscal 2009, we received a communication from a large technology company alleging that we were infringing upon some of their patents. We continue to analyze the potential merits of their claims, the potential defenses to such claims and potential counter claims, and the possibility of a license agreement as an alternative to litigation. We are currently in discussions with this company and no litigation has been filed to date."

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php Enterprise Tue, 18 May 2010 19:00:00 -0800 Curt Hopkins If you're a hiring manager, marketer or journalist, you know how important it is to have leads. Those of us who've been on the hunt for good sources and staff have often resorted to bookmarking portfolios and saving them for a later date. Today, LinkedIn announced Profile Organizer- a service that offers premium users a chance to bookmark and annotate the profiles that interest them most.
]]>

With Profile Organizer, bookmarking is simple. Users save contacts with one click and are given the option to create category files for their contacts. If you want to separate the product managers from the designers or the engineers from the HR staff, you can. Users are given the chance to name their contact folders by occupation, location or other relevant labels. From here you can also choose to add contact information and notes. The information is only visible to you so you can be as descriptive as you like. If you don't already have a tool like Salesforce, the notes section is a great place to jot down a contact's interests and hobbies. If you're the type of person who needs more to jog your memory, it's also a great place to record the details of your last conversation.

The Profile Organizer is available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30-day trial. Business members can access the service but are given a limit of 5 contact folders. Meanwhile, Business Pro and Pro members can create as many as 25 contact folders. To test the new product visit Linkedin.com/organizer.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_launches_profile_bookmarking.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/linkedin_launches_profile_bookmarking.php Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:02:35 -0800 Dana Oshiro One year ago we reviewed a new health app called Practice Fusion, a free, web-based EMR (electronic medical record) system for physicians. This week Practice Fusion announced an investment, amount not disclosed, by salesforce.com. They also announced the upcoming launch of their patient health record (PHR) application on Force.com, salesforce.com's cloud computing platform. With these announcements, now seems an appropriate time for a check-up of Practice Fusion. How is its own health and what are the implications of partnering with salesforce.com?
]]> One year after our initial review, the company is still going strong. The product was being promoted in August 2008 as a 'Google Apps for doctors', providing patient management, scheduling, secure email and more. However, as we pointed out in our article last year, Practice Fusion is not a competitor to Google Health. Practice Fusion is a physician-centered tool, whereas Google Health and the other bigco services are patient-centered.

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.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/practise_fusion_partners_with_salesforce.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/practise_fusion_partners_with_salesforce.php Health Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:00:00 -0800 Richard MacManus 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.
]]> This is the sixth in our series of top products of 2008:
1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008

Our Criteria

In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:

1. Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
2. Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
3. Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.

The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.

Drum Roll... and the List

Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.

Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.

Basecamp

37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.

Confluence (Atlassian)

We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.

It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.

DimDim

This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.

The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.

Wordpress

This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.

Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.

LinkedIn

This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.

But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.

MindTouch Deki

This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.

We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Force.com (Salesforce)

This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Zoho

Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!

This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.

We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.

We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_enterprise_web_products_2008.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_enterprise_web_products_2008.php Enterprise Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:00:00 -0800 Bernard Lunn These are reflections from having spent a few days at the annual Salesforce.com event, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce.
]]> 1. They Are Ambitious

Salesforce wants to be the dominant cloud platform for business. Their view is that computing has seen two waves: the first was the mainframe, and then the PC client server, and now the third is cloud computing. They have been consistent about this since their inception in March 1999, so this is no recent bandwagon hopping.

2. They Have a Good Shot at Meeting This Ambition

They have a powerful mix of capability and relentless focus. They have the resources -- cash, cash flow, clients, track record, management team, and so on -- needed to execute on this vision. Their competitors are bigger, but Salesforce has the advantage of focus. They are pure play, and they have no legacy to protect.

3. They Are a Marketing Machine with Flair

Having attended a few big rah-rah events, such as Java One, I see that Dreamforce compares well on scale, details, and flair. Its messaging and visuals were consistent and powerful, and everything just worked well. This all costs a lot of money (which relates to the next point), but that money has to be well spent, and they seem to be doing that. The presentations had real flair and humor. Benioff knows how to be controversial to get press. They are a billion-dollar business that still acts like a start-up. Even the music was good.

4. Their Biggest Issue Is Maybe Price

There are many lower-cost competitors to their base CRM application. Now that SaaS is increasingly accepted, due in part to Salesforce's evangelical marketing, smaller competitors spending a tiny fraction of what they spend on marketing can undercut them. Their most visible competitor is Zoho, and it does not look like Zoho is going to shy away from this battle, and they have staying power. So Salesforce is fighting on two fronts. On the one hand they are competing with Oracle and SAP for big enterprise accounts. On the other hand they are fighting low-cost competitors, such as Zoho. This will require all their marketing and management skills.

5. They See Today's Troubled Economy as Their Moment to Win Big

They got their early big traction in the last downturn around 2001 and 2002 and have never looked back. They are greedy while others are fearful. They spend more, grow, and hire, while other firms lay off people. The basic economic advantages of cloud computing, such as lower capital expenditures and a faster time to market, resonate in a downturn to the point that they overcome the resistance of conservative buyers to cloud computing.

6. Their Vendor Eco-System Is Making Money and Acting Bullish

Salesforce knows that this matters. This is the lesson they learned from Microsoft. Will they move into the spaces currently occupied by vendors? Of course they will. Vendors will have to be agile; that is just how the game works. But today, in these tough markets, we see vendors that are profitable, growing, hiring, and raising money. The winners in many segments are being defined now. It is a great time to be an entrepreneur in this space. Salesforce knows how to leverage all its capability to make a few winners do very well and then promote that success big time, thus inspiring others to come on board.

7. They Believe That Good Software Design Matters to the Core Economics of Cloud Computing

They refer constantly to their "multi-tenant kernel," which sounds very techie for a such a marketing-driven company. It does appear that they are not suffering from the scaling and reliability problems that we have seen affecting consumer Web 2.0 ventures such as Twitter and Facebook.

8. They Also Know How to Partner with Big Companies to Make Themselves Look Bigger

They wheeled out large companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, as partners. The message was, "We are at the center of an eco-system with big partners." This makes large conservative enterprise buyers feel comfortable.

9. Focused Research and Development

They have a predictable and focused R&D plan, with a major theme each year. This again makes large conservative buyers feel comfortable: they know what to expect.

10. They Will Need to be Careful About Usability Issues

They are adding so much functionality and so many partners that they face the danger of users getting confused and going to simpler point solutions. That "hairball-of-complexity" problem bedeviled Microsoft as it grew fast, but Microsoft enjoyed a lock-in that Salesforce cannot count on. The SaaS world is naturally lock-in resistant, with low switching costs. There is no sign of this being an immediate problem for the company, but it is something they will have to look out for.

See also our most recent story about Salesforce: Salesforce.com Says Hello World.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_things_to_know_about_salesf.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_things_to_know_about_salesf.php Enterprise Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:00:00 -0800 Bernard Lunn Yesterday, an all-star panel at the TechWeb/O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit took a closer look at the implications of the current shift towards cloud computing and discussed the possible business models around it. The panel featured Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch, Salesfore.com's CEO Marc Benioff, Google's Dave Girouard, and VMware's CEO Paul Maritz. The panel was moderated by Tim O'Reilly.
]]> Moderator Tim O'Reilly asked the panelists about their companies' stake in cloud computing and how they thought about it in their specific businesses. VMware's President and CEO Paul Maritz sees his company's role as supplying businesses with the "underlying plumping" that will allow them to become more 'cloud-like' internally, and, through this, allowing them to leverage the external cloud as well.

Adobe's Kevin Lynch considers it his company's role to enable the "fourth generation of software" that will bring a fusion of cloud computing and rich desktop applications to users (by using Adobe Air, of course). At the same time, though, he also acknowledged that Adobe is looking at purely web-based applications with Photoshop.com and Acrobat.com, though he sees Adobe's focus as being on enabling technologies.

In contrast to this, Dave Girouard, who manages Google's enterprise business, sees it as Google's mission to bring users "entirely into the cloud" and not just to create a "cloud-like" experience. Girouard also used this opportunity to chastise the enterprise computing world as 'stagnant' and 'unenlightened' when it comes to considering the user experience for its clients and employees.

Saleforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff mostly talked about the importance of developers in building applications on top of Salesforce.com.

In the second part of the interview, the panelists spent most of the time talking about delivering value in the cloud and possible business models around cloud computing.

Comparing his company to Oracle and SAP, Benioff said they were "dying models" and comparing Salesforce.com to them would not even be fair.

Most of the panelists agreed that Microsoft's entry into the cloud computing business validated the market and, maybe unsurprisingly, argued that developers should look at the different options that are available to them now and decide which one would work best for the apps they are building.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cloud_computing_panel_at_web_2.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cloud_computing_panel_at_web_2.php News Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:08:59 -0800 Frederic Lardinois At big events, PR likes to put out some info prior to the event under embargo, but save something exciting for the Keynote. Well I guess that was Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, joining Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, up on stage to announce their partnership. Facebook sent Sheryl Sandberg, not Mark Zuckerberg, as this was a business crowd with more Blackberries than iPhones and plenty of ties.

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.

]]> Who Was Not Invited?

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.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_puts_on_suit_dances_with_salesforce.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_puts_on_suit_dances_with_salesforce.php Enterprise Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:05:44 -0800 Bernard Lunn When Google launched its Visualization API in March, it only allowed developers to create applications on top of spreadsheets in Google Docs. Starting today, developers can also use the API to create graphs and gadgets from any data source connected to the web, including SQL databases and Excel spreadsheets. The Visualization API gives developers the ability to build gadgets, using a set of over 40 different types of visualizations, ranging from interactive bar charts and timelines, to maps and gauges.
]]> According to Itai Raz from the Visualization API team, Google also created and documented an open-source Python library that will allow developers to start using the API quickly and which runs on Google's AppEngine.

Salesforce

Today, Salesforce.com also announced that it has created a number of tools that will make using the Visualization API easier for Salesforce's own customers and developers. These tools include code snippets and API harnesses and will allow Salesforce customers to create custom reporting and analysis applications for Salesforce's CRM solution or on top of Saleforce's newly announced Force.com platform.



Reporting in the Cloud

As Google points out, more and more companies are storing their data in the cloud, so being able to visualize this data and creating good reporting tools is becoming increasingly important. Creating these reports in the cloud as well seems like a logical step, and we expect that quite a few new applications will be created on top of the Visualization API.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_opens_visualization_api.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_opens_visualization_api.php Product Reviews Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:55:08 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Salesforce.com was founded less than 10 years ago, in March 1999. This is hard to remember when you walk into the Dreamforce event at the Moscone and see all the companies, both large and small, proclaiming that they are part of their ecosystem. Salesforce.com, more than any other company, can claim to have popularized the SaaS concept with their catchy "No Software" logo. Today they are announcing their next step forward.
]]> Dreamforce Annual Milestone Announcements

For many years, Salesforce.com has had the policy of announcing their next big move on the eve of their annual Dreamforce event (aka, where Salesforce partners get to pitch their stuff). In past years they announced internal facing applications, used by employees. Even if the employees were talking to customers, it was still an internal app. The news was simply that it was SaaS.

Today Salesforce.com Says Hello World

They are announcing a way to build apps that connect the internal facing processes that drive and account for transactions with the external public web based apps. This is a big move. The two examples they showed were travel and recruitment, but it does not take too much imagination to think of more. Given the size of the Dreamforce ecosystem on display in the convention center, one assumes that there is a big pipeline of apps under development.

Which Way Do You Face?

As with any new tool or API, there are other ways to achieve the same end. The question is simply which way is more efficient. It is really a question of which way you face. Do you look from the web into back end enterprise systems? That is the traditional way it is done today. The web developer asks the back end system how they want their data and how it will get data back. The Salesforce.com way looks the other way, from the back end systems out to the world.

Timing Is Good To Get Developers

They are likely to get a lot of traction with developers for three reasons:

1. Enterprise SaaS is going mainstream, it is a big market to get into right now.

2. Consumer services are facing a downturn, developers need something new.

3. Getting into back end processes is a better way to build long term client engagements.

Platforms Here, Platforms There

Platforms are everywhere. Developers love Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine looks so cool. There will be a bit of tug within the developers between what looks most technically elegant with least lock-in, versus what will make money quickly and reliably. It is possible that Salesforce will appeal to these more pragmatic types, the ones who have been the mainstay of the Microsoft ecosystem in the past.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/salesforcecom_says_hello_world.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/salesforcecom_says_hello_world.php Enterprise Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:00:00 -0800 Bernard Lunn During the PC era, the technology stack was controlled by Microsoft Windows and Wintel - the "Wintel" era. We are now entering a new era, called variously 'Cloud' or 'SaaS' or 'Enterprise 2.0'.

In this era everything is different - the stack, the players and the potential for value creation. Let's outline the basic shape of this emerging era, in particular defining what makes up the new stack.

]]> The New Stack Has 3 Layers

At the Top - SaaS: these are the end user services that we actually interact with, such as Basecamp. This is the "final mile". This is what we used to call application software, vertical systems or value added systems. Although SaaS is sometimes also used to describe the layer below, we prefer to label the top as SaaS and the middle as Cloud Computing. Typically this layer has had thousands of companies. These are our bootstrapped Gritty Entrepreneurs.

In the Middle - Cloud Computing: this is the Cloud where we witness the "sound and fury" of BigCos battling it out - Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and others. This layer is the most fluid and where all the deals are. This layer can be seen as two layers, but the difference is very blurry. Some SaaS companies create some "middleware" that they position in this layer. Some start-ups create middleware as their primary focus, with an end game of getting acquired by one of the Cloud BigCos. Over time, these will tend to get rolled up into a few big platforms that compete by providing higher levels of abstraction for developers.

At the Bottom - Core Technology: this is what we might call "traditional Silicon Valley", hard core patent-protected technology sold to big companies that use it as part of their stack. Arista, the latest venture from Andreas Bechtolsheim falls into this category.

Spectators And Players

Most of us are spectators in the Cloud Computing game. It is fun to watch the big guys duke it out and ReadWriteWeb will continue to report on that. Entrepreneurs need to understand the strategies of the big players who will be their "platform partner". But we all have lots of opportunities to be players at the top of the stack, in the SaaS layer. This is where there are low barriers to entry, massively reduced R&D costs and incumbents who will be slow to embrace SaaS for fear of cannibalizing their core business.

Has The Stack Value Inverted?

Traditionally, value was at the bottom of the stack, which is why Microsoft and Intel were so dominant in the past. With a few notable exceptions like SAP, the top of the stack tended to be smaller companies.

It is possible that this has inverted, that the real value is now at the top of the stack and not at the bottom. For example, Arista will probably be very successful, but their market will be limited to the few companies who build huge data centers. Those clients will place huge orders but will also have a lot of negotiating clout.

Lock-In And Network Effects?

So maybe the value is all in the middle now? This is certainly where all the action is today. The two big questions at this layer are:

1. Lock-in? How easy will it be to move your SaaS service between Amazon AWS, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and other contenders? Today there is quite a lot of technical lock-in, you cannot move from one to another without some re-coding. But is that a big deal? No, because a) any Platform that jacks up prices will get hammered by their competitors and b) when you do need to move, it may require some coding changes but the move is transparent to end users. So, very little lock-in.

2. Viral Network Effects? Market leaders will get a lower cost of sale, but there is no social media viral effect at the Cloud Computing Platform layer.

Without Lock-In or Viral Network Effects, this layer will be commoditized. It will be very, very big but it will be a thin margin commodity business that is all about scale.

So The SaaS Cream Floats To The Top?

This is our theory. The value is with the small SaaS companies in the "final mile" interacting with end users. This is what we are seeing with our bootstrapped Gritty Entrepreneurs.

What About Players Across Layers?

Next week I will be at Dreamforce, the Salesforce.com annual event in San Francisco. Salesforce.com is the SaaS pioneer that defined the market. At some stage they decided that being on the top layer only was not enough and they created their Force.com "platform" on which others could create applications.

IBM also operates at many layers of the stack. But they do so with separate divisions that would be large companies in their own right.

It will be interesting to see how this stack evolves and specifically how well Salesforce.com succeeds with their mission to operate at both the top and the middle layer.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_technology_stack.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_technology_stack.php Enterprise Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:15:00 -0800 Bernard Lunn