The old joke in the IT community is that the highest bandwidth method of communication in existence is a 747 full of backup tapes – too bad the latency is so high.

Dan Golding looks at Amazon’s latest Web service: a hard drive in a FedEx box.

A couple of things struck me: first, the very good sportsmanship of my distinguished panel when I threw some very confronting questions (”So, VMware, IBM, talk to us about vendor lock-in”); and second, the very widespread acceptance and understanding of different kinds of cloud - not only IaaS and PaaS but the subtler and important distinction between commodity and enterprise-grade public clouds.

Perhaps most striking, though, was the fact that our largeish room was packed solid for the entire hour-and-a-half we were on stage. When we collected questions on index cards I had two fat handfuls of excellent, insightful queries, on security, licensing, telecommunications, smartphones, standards, market sizing; far more material than I could possibly cover in the available time. It is proof if proof were needed that the opportunity around cloud computing is the single most exciting prospect available to ambitious entrepreneurs right now. Many thanks to TiEcon and to Lightspeed, my generous hosts.

The Open Cloud Manifesto certainly achieved what it set out to do: it got attention focused on cloud computing. Rather than the 73-odd companies supporting it, most attention focused on those who didn’t: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com and so on. The whole thing was cleverly used to advance vendor agendas. No surprise there.

A key (if possibly unanticipated) consequence however is that the cloud community’s chief protagonist Reuven Cohen has been handed the job of asking for the creation of a new cloud computing trade association at Cloud Expo tomorrow. Vendors, users and other interested parties will be invited to come together as an advocacy and marketing group for the cloud industry. The association is expected to harbor both manifesto supporters such as IBM and Cisco as well as naysayers like Microsoft. The idea for a trade association – which does not have a name or attribution at this point – was born out of a marathon Monday night closed-door discussion between vendors in New York. Tip o’ the hat to Reuven and the participants. The association should help move cloud consensus an forwards. It’ll certainly be center stage at the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum meet on Thursday and at The 451 Group’s lunchtime cloud convention tomorrow. At the very least it’s likely the CloudCamp ‘uncoference’ series will be given over to the association. CloudCamp – another of Reuven’s charges - is in danger of collapsing under its own success. At least 50 different CloudCamps have been held or are planned and it’s being held together by a small number of hard working folks. There were more than 300 attendees at the recent London get together.

So I am optimistic but not, you know, delusional.

Actually, let me refine that. Ingenuity with a great dash of hubris and a blithe disregard for financial reality got us into this mess. Only ingenuity with humility and a sober eye towards financial reality will get us out. Still, that’s exactly what I am seeing from entrepreneurs running virtualization and cloud firms, and from IT directors who are also struggling to make their systems more useful and efficient. Human intelligence wasn’t crushed in the dot-com crash and didn’t burst with the housing bubble. The tide goes in and out but the diligent fisherfolk are still mending their nets. The real work goes on.

ETA: We can also learn a lot from Mike Mulligan.

Such a move probably won’t happen now, at least not right away, after MuleSource announced its new CEO earlier this week. But you can expect deeper ties with SpringSource since the new CEO, Greg Schott, had been running marketing at SpringSource up until last month. As far as I can tell, Schott left SpringSource for the top job at MuleSource. A SpringSource spokesman described his departure from there as “very” amicable. SpringSource, which has a deep executive bench, likely will not replace Schott. Current executives, including newly-hired vp of product management Shaun Connolly, who held the same position at JBoss, both when it was independent and part of Red Hat, will take over any vp of marketing duties.

It’s Schott’s first CEO gig, though he had been chairman of the board at VerticalNet for that company’s last three years of existence until it was acquired by Bravo Solutions early last year. He previously ran marketing at Agile Software and DG Systems. I have my doubts Schott was MuleSource’s first choice given how long the company’s CEO search lasted and the fact that he’s never been a CEO before. But he’s an experienced marketing executive coming from a successful commercial open source vendor, which could be just what MuleSource needs at this stage of its existence.

MuleSource has always been much stronger in technology than in marketing, in fact I’m not aware that the company has ever employed a senior marketing executive since it was launched 2 1/2  years ago. And Schott will build bridges to SpringSource, which Mulesource has never had more than a cursory relationship with, and other open source companies. More than one commercial open source software company executive has grumbled to me in the past about Rosenberg being difficult for other open source vendors to work with. I doubt they’ll have that problem with Schott.

As for SpringSource buying MuleSource, it still makes a lot of sense to me. Mulesource’s software is built on a Java technology stack that includes Spring, Hibernate and Tomcat, all of which SpringSource exists to support and supports better than anyone in the industry. MuleSource has integration and governance applications that would be a natural extension of MuleSource’s application development tools, and SpringSource executives have designs on expanding into those areas, or so they’ve told us in the past.

I expect you’ll see some formal partnership activities between the two companies in the coming months, which will facilitate an eventual merger.

There were plenty of connections between the two companies. SAP Ventures was one of Coghead’s backers. Given that Coghead had reportedly been seeking a third venture round to keep it going, perhaps SAP decided to cut its losses now. The companies had also inked a partnership last May, supporting the integration of “situational applications” developed by business analysts in Coghead with SAP business applications. SAP has made moves to software-as-a-service, particularly with its Business ByDesign offering for the mid-market, which has come to the market in fits and starts since being unveiled a year and a half ago. Coghead’s technology could be complementary to that platform, supporting lightweight Web application development.

As for why Coghead failed, Michael Topolovich, the founder and CTO of former Coghead partner Delivered Innovation, an application development house, posted a lengthy but interesting take on the company’s shortcomings based on his firm’s dealings with it. To sum up his post, Coghead had strong development tools, but an unstable platform that was prone to outages; poor marketing and positioning; an unclear channel strategy, too much executive turnover; and promised more to customers than it could really deliver. Many of those customers thought they’d be able to do anything and everything with Coghead’s tools and platform and pay next to nothing for the privilege.

Coghead’s demise is certainly a cautionary tale for the SaaS and cloud generation. It will probably find a better home as an add-on to other SaaS technologies at SAP.

One of the best known of these, if not the best funded, was Coghead, which launched in 2006 and raised $11.2m from El Dorado Ventures, American Capital Strategies and SAP Ventures. Communications from the company had ceased for six months, which is usually a telltale sign of a vendor’s imminent demise. And sure enough, yesterday Coghead officially called it quits in a letter sent to the few customers it had won, blaming the economy. The service will no longer be supported and customers have until April 30 to get their data off Coghead’s servers. You can read more about that HERE.

Is this the beginning of the end for PaaS? Not necessarily, but we don’t expect much venture capital to pour into this space. New statups will have the 800-pound gorilla of Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform to contend with, not to mention more established startups like Caspio and Longjump, founded six and three years before Coghead, respectively, that have built up significant customer bases without benefit of any venture funding. We think Coghead’s demise has more to do with it being late to the game and not offering anything that was better or innovative in any way compared to existing offerings.

Still, this should give vendors and investors pause. While customers are looking for lower-cost alternatives to upfront license fees and traditional software maintenance contracts and upgrade paths, taking technology or processes that were typically maintained in house and serving them from the cloud is no panacea.

I never saw a taxonomy I didn’t want to argue over, and good as it is, this one is no exception. I think Evident Software and vKernel should be included under billing, Bluestripe and vmSight under monitoring, Appistry, DataSynapse and Univa UD alongside their longtime rivals 3Tera and Cassatt. I wouldn’t call that section Private Cloud, either - my term for it is application fabric, to distinguish it from another kind of application virtualization aimed at the desktop. Private cloud enablement is shorthand for production VM automation in my book, so I would put Q-Layer there, alongside DynamicOps, Embotics, Fortisphere and ManageIQ (and indeed I did so in our November report Virtually Automatic.) Good to see VMware and Sun up there, but the workload/provisioning/scheduling VMware does at least is fairly basic and hypervisor-specific compared with what the production VM automation guys can do. And you can bet your life that VM security types like Altor, Catbird, Reflex and HyTrust will be reinventing themselves as cloud security players, especially now that VMware has bought their rival Blue Lane.

Otherwise I love it!

The week of November 10 sees the annual 451 Group Client Conference taking place in Boston. It’s one of the highlights of our year - a chance to get all our folks, analysts, vendors, investors and end users, into a room for a candid conversation on what happens next. I’ll be having a public row with Dan Golding, another good buddy and arch-nemesis, over whether the cloud belongs in the managed hosting space or in the enterprise. I’ll also be presenting prizes in our Innovators’ Showcase and moderating what’s shaping up to be a sensational end-user panel. Other ICE-y moments will include a public row between William Fellows and Antonio Piraino over high performance computing and John Abbott’s panel on big iron in the enterprise. The best part of the client conference, though, is one on one sessions. I look forward to meeting with as many of my readers as I possibly can.

After brief side trips to New York and Vegas I will be back in the Valley for the Cloud Computing Expo, which looks like a reunion for the usual suspects (Hi, Alex! Hi, Anup! Hi, Billy, Bob, Dave, Etay, Javier, Jay, Joe, John, Ken, Lynn, Reuven, Roland, Serguei and Vik! Did I miss anyone?)

As always, if you’re a reader, come and say hi!