Piper Jaffray has published a 300+ page study on the cloud computing industry based on a recent survey undertaken of 100 CIOs. Bottom line, cloud computing is expected to grow significantly over the next five years. 

    Survey respondents expect the mix of cloud computing to escalate strongly to 13.5% in five years. This equates to a five-year CAGR of 19.2%, or 23.9% when we also incorporate IDC’s forecast that total software budgets will grow 4.7% annually. In other words, software spending will grow gradually in the next five years, but the mix of spend allocated to cloud-based applications will likely surge rapidly. Another way to think about the data is that the Cloud Computing market is expected to grow five times as fast as the broader software market: 23.9% vs. 4.7%.

If anything, I think the prediction is conservative and the impact could be much larger in magnitude when mainstream …

As usual, Michael Skok of North Bridge ventures will be presenting the results of the annual Future of Open Source survey at this year's OSBC conference, March 17-18 in San Francisco.  This is a great opportunity to weigh in and provide your perspective on some important business questions. Here are the 2009 Results as reported by Ostatic.

• Survey: …

Around a year ago, I took on a new role at Sun as vice president of lifecycle marketing. While the title was an odd one, the charter was pretty straightforward: Bring the best practices of open source, Web 2.0, and modern online marketing to Sun's portfolio of servers, storage, software, and services in order to drive up revenues and drive down customer acquisition costs.

Open source was an incredible calling card that we could use to determine what customers were interested in. Now we just needed to figure out how to harvest that interest.  It worked for …