This week an open cloud manifesto has got published with intent of beginning a conversation in the direction of formulating principles for open cloud computing. The companies behind drafting this open cloud manifesto are of an opinion that innovations happening in cloud computing area in terms of standards, interoperability, integration and portability should be guided by the principles of openness.

The manifesto has covered topics like importance and need of cloud computing today and challenges and barriers for its adoption. The cloud computing manifesto has identified goals like availability of choices, flexibility in cloud computing usage, speed and agility to respond quickly to changes and open cloud computing skills. This all should help building a foundation for open standards and architecture for cloud computing.

The initiative is criticized by Microsoft calling it as a secret cloud manifesto. A blog attributed to Steven Martin, senior director of platform product management, has said in its post that the document was asked to sign 'as is' without modification or additional input. Though Microsoft admits that there should be standardization, it feels that it is too early to do that. Amazon supported the initiative and Google is yet to comment on it.

The responses from Microsoft, Amazon and Google will be helpful in guiding the future path for this open cloud manifesto.

IT services companies can relax a bit with news coming from Gartner managing vice president, Joanne Correia. US sub-prime crisis has haunted software services company higher authorities with a fear of diminishing IT spending. But prediction from Gartner that worldwide IT spending should top $3.4 trillion in 2008, up 8 percent from 2007, will give them a restful night’s sleep. Much of this growth is due to the decline in the U.S. dollar.

Software spending and IT services are expected to see the biggest gain, up 10 percent and 9.4 percent respectively in 2008. "Software as a service/cloud computing, service-oriented architecture/Web 2.0, and open-source software are causing huge changes to the software market," wrote Joanne Correia in a research note. "Many of these factors are impacting market growth as enterprises replace assets with per-use services."

With internet proliferation on-demand services are on high. Even desktop bully Microsoft is trying to taste waters in web world with software as a service offerings lined up. Coming few years will be most happening and we may witness desktop losing major chunk of pie to cloud computing. But whatever may be the scenario IT spending will grow up at least in 2008.

During recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, Microsoft released details about its SaaS initiative & its comments about SaaS adoption by ISVs.

Microsoft has established 'Microsoft Software + Services Incubation Center Program'  through which ISVs are guided through a structured series of business and architectural consulting sessions with the support of an established hosting provider to help ensure their business models and applications are ready to address the challenges of SaaS based delivery.  This program now includes 20 incubation centers worldwide with 10 in Europe, eight in North America, and two in Asia. More than 550 independent software vendors have enrolled since its launch in 2006.

John Zanni, general manager of worldwide hosting at Microsoft, said: "Microsoft realizes that the evolution of the software industry will reach far beyond just bringing software to the browser. Partnerships are critical for ISVs to be successful in the new world of software plus services. The program builds an integrated ecosystem to help ISVs deploy service-based applications. Now through the tremendous success of this program, there is no doubt that building an integrated ecosystem plays an integral role in helping ISVs deploy service-based applications"

Considering elevated initiatives from company like Microsoft, SaaS transition by ISVs looks more promising.

Today while a post by Phil Wainewright who is very well known technology writer at ZDNet I came across a very convincing definition of Web 3.0. According to him Web 3.0 is technology that brings Web 2.0 and on-demand applications into the enterprise.

Enterprise Mashups is helping world achieve Web 3.0 objective. Some call it composite web application. These mashups will help combine information from enterprise search engines, web services, messaging systems, business intelligence engines and data integration solutions and combine that information from external services from all stakeholders, partners and suppliers and emerging external data sources to deliver the information at one place.

The open Web services and SOAs philosophy for application development is lowering the integration impedances and now applications are able to readily combine all web services into rich new applications. This can be a precursor for the long-awaited arrival of true software reuse.

The development language would not be as important as architecture and future thinking for development of such web applications. The key is to create virtual humanized web applications that will talk, hear and share with each other to provide true electronic communication across the supply chain. The flow towards Web 3.0 development will soon increase.

Ovum (www.ovum.com) , a consulting and advisory services with focus on convergence across telecoms, IT services and software. Ovum clients  range from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies and governments. They include IT vendors, IT service providers, technology user organisations, telecom operators, regulators, equipment suppliers, consultancies and investors.

Ovum recently published article 'Pass SaaS to India?' which is an extract taken from Ovum's Straight Talk service. This daily email bulletin provides Ovum's expert's views and opinions on important news and events in global IT and telecoms. This article discussed transition of traditional software products into software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Article further enlist challenges like costly technology & R/D investment required by Western ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) during transition of its legacy software products into SaaS/On-demand offering. Ovum strongly advised use of Outsource product development services by ISVs in US & Europe to control transition cost & benfit from technology, domain & process expertise.This article featured e-Zest as one of the Outsourced product vendor who is offering & benefiting from SaaS enablement /SaaS transition services. e-Zest is working with ISVs & SaaS startups for SaaS delivery consulting & implementation from last 3 years.

According to Gartner, a third of all software vendors will opt for transition to SaaS model in the next 3 years, and 40% of new applications will be built on it; which means if you are not on the SaaS platform, your competition might soon be.  Almost an year a back, e-Zest lauched 'SaaS enable your Software Products' as an OPD portfolio service, now with Ovum's recommendation it seems become a de-facto option for ISVs to use OPD services for SaaS transition/Saas enablement.