Remember recess in elementary? That's right, a hundred kids running at full speed in different directions, headed for unknown destinations, totally oblivious of who would be there and why? Exciting, yes. Fun, yes. Total mayhem, you bet. The Cloud Computing industry is growing at a break-neck pace, recess is out, and it's time to make some sense of the chaos.

Collaboration is a broad and well trodden topic; in fact, it was Salesforce.com's theme at their event of the year, titled "Collabor8". But just because Salesforce.com can throw around phrases like "collaborative software", or taking a "collaborative approach" in their business vernacular, it doesn't make it any easier to grasp in a real sense, nor to implement in a real-life, competitive and fast-paced environment, especially if your business has nothing to do with Salesforce.com.

Green Debate: Cloud vs. On Premise

Does the cloud really make businesses more energy efficient? A recently released study done by Accenture and WSP Environmental Consultants boldly declares that it does.

The study states, "businesses that choose to run applications in the cloud can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by 30 percent or more versus running those same applications on their own IT infrastructure."

There are numerous benefits inherent with SaaS applications and we have discussed many of them on this blog: anywhere access, low startup costs, automatic upgrades, etc. We've always known that the SaaS apps are more environmentally friendly than on-premise software, but have not taken the time to quantify and prove this.

In September, Chris Thorman of Softwareadvice.com released a study regarding the environmental impact of SaaS applications in his blog post titled, "SaaS v. On-premise Software: Which One is More Green." The post garnered a lot of buzz and sparked a healthy debate on the topic.