I know the post is long in the tooth, but my 2 cents: EDI as implemented by today's VANs is a waning modality, but still throws of about two billion a year in communications services and related solutions sales, however you slice and dice it. The push towards direct peering As2 and E2.0 centric hubs (my trading partners only, not a globally accesible commerce messaging system) is a symptom of deteriorating sentiment against the VANs, who have not innovated a damn thing in years. With the exception of the new era B2B service providers of the multi-tenant crowd, and one small but potent API provider (Loren Data Corp), there is a lack of vigor in classical B2B services. IBM sold a VAN (IE) to Francisco, it was added to GXS, as was Inovis, and stil, not much has changed. But there are surprising opportunities for private capital to succeed with just such innovators - as we see with SPS Commerce who recently IPO'd, and the aforementioned Loren Data Corp, singled out for uncompensated praise by Gartner's Ben L'hreaus for bringing the only EEDI API to market, now being put to E2,0 goodness by the likes of NetEDI of UK, and other notable fast movers, taking the E2.o playbook to the staid supply chain market. Todd Gould, the founder of Loren Data, continues to innovate despite being a bootstrapped entrepreneur, as he and his loyal band of 5 carries on a gargantuan crusade against consolidation in the sector, and a word will suffice for the initiated.

ThruDispatch - turned down by every VC in the Valley after 1000 independent mobile service customers surveyed positive. This was in 05-07. Fucking A

The industry does not need a complete spec for portability of VM instances, but rather a secure transaction broker spec for simple failover. The insurance industry is all over the creation of a "blind trusted pool" of API brokers between clouds that would allow erastwhile competitors to backstop each other's failures and outages without compromising user security. They are concentrating on transactions, storage proxies, and session preservation. In other words, short, long, and very long object lifetimes that can be shipped out to an unknown (yet trusted) third party in case of an unreachable host.

I wonder if the costs argument has been won, while the cases that highlight indemnification and remediation for business continuity issues start to look more onerous. Right now, now matter how SAAS (Even more so PAAS) holds up to costs and operational advantages, the SME that operates real time, commercial infrastructure is having a devil of a time getting major professional lines insurance coverage. why is this? 1. Most SAAS and PAAS companies are private, under-capitalized, and closed to outside certifications and ratings. 2. Underwriters can walk onto a SME premises and inspect the server closet - 3. The insurance industry has just not caught up to the SAAS and PAAS vendors, even the most august who have gained SAS70.

We have a similar point of view regarding the integration of EDI messaging via web services, i.e., why does everyone have to have Gentran showed down their throat? We provide a simple WS API that allows the sending and receiving of EDI messages globally. this can be glued into small accounting by a developer or used by a SAAS / PAAS company as an integrated invisible gateway. We sould sure like to work with you, Rick.

The old Chasm. Have we learned nada? Medium business really, really needs and is ready for fault tolerant grids hosted remotely - yes these are clouds used for capital line of business (CLOB) applications. These apps usually run on medium commodity servers, and SME's are aching to migrate to remote hosting if only one issue can be addressed: They need insurance against continuity disruptions. If insurers can't price the risk, they can't offer cloud clients coverage. You can extol the benefits of cloud all day, but if you can't indemnify the central operations against failure or recover-ability, you can't ask the SME to take capital applications, such as ERP and Supply Chain or POS, out of the server closet and move them into a cloud.