Thanks to the Google Gmail and Google Apps outage this week, analysts and enterprises have weighed in on whether hosted infrastructure is reliable enough for companies to run their business on it. The consensus: the Internet is still too risky to trust as a business platform, but some vendor will eventually get it right.

Despite the reality check indicating risks in cloud computing, brought to the forefront most recently with the Google outage, Intuit is moving further into the cloud with a new offering, “Connected Services.” Though it could be a huge risk for protecting customer data, Intuit thinks the cloud has a “silver lining.”

There’s another movement in cloud computing. Antivirus functionality is moving from PCs into the network cloud. The University of Michigan developed the next-gen system.

Unisys is talking about a reality check regarding security in the cloud. At Black Hat this week, the chief security architect at Unisys claimed virtualization will become an “apocalypse” because the security risks will not only wipe out the anticipated savings but will actually cost more than not virtualizing IT infrastructure. He also claims that virtualizing a firewall won’t work.

A US federal appeals court judge weighed in this week with a landmark decision declaring open-source code is subject to copyright laws. Programmers who copyright their open-source work will have the right to control modification and distribution.

IBM’s vice president of Standards and Open-Source vice president predicted at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco that the adoption of Linux-based systems will begin to grow among small and medium IT users because of SaaS and the movement of IT to the cloud, which eliminates the complex integration challenges that smaller companies face; and Linux shows no sign of slowing down in enterprise IT.

Firefox trumped Tux, the Linux penguin to win the “Who’s Who Next Open Source Idol” Crown. Mozilla’s Firefox browser was selected by more than 1,100 attendees as the mascot.

Aiming to make complex cryptography easier and safer to implement, Google released Keyczar, an open-source cryptographic toolkit.

There were four recent notable acquisitions. Nortel acquired Pingtel, an open-source enterprise unified communications company. Prior to the acquisition, the two companies collaborated for 18 months on an enterprise software communications system for SMBs — a growing segment of Nortel’s customers.

HP plans to acquire Colubris Networks this fall and integrate Colubris’ wireless technology and 802.11 capabilities into HP’s switches and other networking products. The acquisition is part of HP’s strategy for catching up with Cisco in the wireless network world.

JDA Software Group agreed to buy i2 Technologies, which was under pressure to sell as a strategy of improving shareholder value. JDA expects the merger to save $20 million per year.

After announcing it was being acquired by Microsoft, Datallegro, which makes data warehousing appliances, was sued by XPrime, which claims Dataallegro stole information about technology that XPrime was trying to patent.

SAP’s enterprise customers are still disgruntled at the vendor for forcing them onto enterprise support. Though SAP says it will result in additional benefits such as efficiencies and cost savings for customers, they’re not yet convinced. Time will tell, and a reality check on this strategy will be provided through feedback at the SAP User Group meeting in September.

Noted & Quoted

• NASSCOM released a report predicting the Indian software product market will grow to $9.5-12 billion by 2015
• Michael Arrington of TechCrunch plans to build a $200 Web tablet using open-source Linux and Firefox
• The Ministry of National Education in Poland is advising its schools and universities to switch to open source
• An MIT research team has developed a computer program that deletes patient-identifying details from medical records but leaves the medial information intact for researchers
• Symphony Technology Group has a new Managing Director and Operating Partner, and Kana Software named a new Chief Customer Officer (read about more executive moves)

“People often talk about this as the internet service revolution. That will eventually lead to machines with lots of server capacity, low-cost computing, low-cost storage. And that will let us write software in an even more ambitious way, eliminating the last constraints we have.”
- Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates, at a forum in Hong Kong to mark the tenth anniversary of Microsoft’s Asian research arm