I just read some good articles on the long term forecast of Cloud Computing on Wired's Portfolio.com site. the article highlights a key issue regarding the preceived fears of SaaS and security.

In an ongoing survey conducted by the research firm IDC, almost 75 percent of I.T. executives and CIOs report that security is their primary concern, followed by performance and reliability.

Good perspective from those that have the big picture view:

NetDocuments, a leader in SaaS content management, announced today that it has been named to KMWorld Magazine's prestigious list of the "100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management." Published annually, this list recognizes organizations that have played a role in the creation and evolution of the knowledge management market through consistent innovation of technologies, products and services. Companies chosen for this list are compiled by KM practitioners, theorists, analysts, vendors and their customers and colleagues.

Great to have Keith Schneider join NetDocuments as a Senior Account Manager based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Many in the legal community know Keith as the Product Champion for NetDocuments the past three years. It's nice to have him wear the "ND Hat" as a full time employee. Keith worked for LexisNexis for over 22 years as a client manager and product champion responsible for working with legal, government and national accounting customers to understand their information needs, business objectives and the firm's IT strategy. Keith was instrumental in forming the LexisNexis strategic alliance with NetDocuments in 2006 and, as product champion, directed the sales and marketing efforts within LexisNexis for NetDocuments.

Orem, Utah (February 25, 2008) -- NetDocuments, a leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) document, email and records management service provider announced today that NetDocuments was named to KMWorld's 100 Companies that Matter In Knowledge Management. KMWorld recognizes the companies that best exemplify the ideals of true knowledge management. The list was complied by KM practitioners, theorists, analysts, vendors and their customers and colleagues, This is the 8th year of the list. "NetDocuments is pleased to be recognized as an eminent provider in the knowledge management industry," said Ken Duncan, CEO of NetDocuments. "Going back to the early 90's our team has been developing trend-setting products and services in the document and knowledge management space that have influenced the industry and more importantly improved efficiency and productivity in the lives of our customers."

Consider how technology has really made us more efficient over time. In 1986 I went to Europe and managed the european operation of a computer company. I remember around 1987 we got a fax machine….wow….it changed our lives. Then about 1992 we got email…. What a savings in time instead of printing and faxing, we simply typed and sent… I worked at WordPerfect and Novell with Groupwise in its early stages and now we all recognize how email has truly changed the way we do business and how we communicate. Its drastically helped us reduce paper…. (now of course I hear how many attorneys tell their secretaries to print their inbox for them….) Isn’t it sad to run across this item on the ABA's Site-Tation that states: " According to the 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report, 61% of attorneys save email related to a case or client matter by printing out a hard copy." Actually, it's probably a good thing that we didn't find the percentage of lawyers who later scan those printouts of emails as TIFFs to reconvert them to digital form. This isn't even a step toward a paperless office - it's a move toward a "papermore" office. OLD WAYS DIE HARD! By the way, one of the major lessons from the Katrina and Rita disasters was the vulnerability of paper records in disasters. The fetish for paper runs against technology and business trends. It places law firms and their clients at an unnecessary risk. Paper is not the most efficient mode of communication and it is no longer the most secure method of retaining informationâ€"but you CANNOT protect paper. BUT it sure a lot easier to READ!! Right?

One of the key benefits of the SaaS model is that it allows better, more frequent, stable, and comprehensive updates to the software being served up to all customers at the same time. This has certainly been the case with NetDocuments. As you hopefully are aware, the NetDocuments Service consists of the following four fully integrated services: 1) Document Management, 2) Email Management, 3) Extranets, and 4) Digital Records Management. The Service continues to be aggressively updated at a pace of 9 releases a year. Our largest enhancement ever, the implementation of FAST as our primary search engine, is scheduled to be released later this summer when we run FAST in "parallel" with our existing search engine. The FAST search engine will support relevency ranking, phrase and proximity searching, snippets, and later this year lemmatization, lingustics, entity extraction, and topic based searching. FAST will be the base search engine for all four NetDocuments services.