Last week I was invited by our friends at n2n communications to attend ZDNet Australia’s TechLines second broadcast, on the topic of cloud computing. TechLines is described as “a series of live broadcasts on top-of-mind tech issues facing today’s IT professionals” and was streamed live on ZDNet’s site. For those of us not involved day to day in the media, it had an element of glitz about it, what with TV cameras, support crew buzzing around and James O’Loghlin (of ABC’s New Inventors fame) as the host. In fact it may be the most glamorous event I’ve attended since I was privileged enough to be an audience member for the filming (before a live studio audience, no less) of an episode of Hey Dad in 1990. But I wistfully digress.

The event was high quality and the panellists were engaging, particularly Mark Pesce (who needs to be pretty engaging with a job title as bold as “Futurist”). Analogies were well employed to bring an ostensibly nerdy topic into the layperson realm. For example, James drew a parallel between cloud computing and his ownership of a lawn mower: he only uses it once a month, but owns it 365 days a year, whereas if there were a convenient way of simply obtaining its services for the few dozen hours each year that he actually needs them, he’d surely be better off.

The discussion migrated fairly quickly, though, from that consumer-led basis to an emphasis on private clouds. Perhaps it was due to the cloud vendor representation on the panel consisting only of Microsoft and IBM, but the discourse became a little bogged down in back-end IT efficiencies. Great fodder for CFOs and supply-side-focused CIOs, but largely ignoring the elephant in the room that is the consumer-led public cloud.

Let’s be clear. “Private cloud” is a flash name for restructuring your infrastructure arrangements, nothing more. It’s an incremental step and I get its appeal, but the consumer-led revolution that’s happening (that’s happened, in fact) in the public cloud is the real game changer.

I worry a little that whist some CIOs and management teams ponder over incremental change, their staff and customers are already leading the change by demanding that the usability, seamless upgrades, reliability and, frankly, enjoyment that they experience every day on Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube set the standard for enterprise computing. Of course, every corporate IT decision needs to be risk-conscious and make financial sense. But many of the leading cloud computing solutions, whilst hitting the ROI metrics for senior management, also provide rich, ever-improving features that can be a source of tremendous motivation and inspiration for users. With that can come productivity gains to eclipse even the biggest server move.

Hope to see more events like this in Australia.

Following my recent series of blogs on continuous integration on the Force.com platform I thought it worthwhile following up with a short slide presentation and actual demo of CI working in the wild. So please view the slide presentation here:

and the demo here:

Everyone “gets” the concept of Salesforce as the killer CRM system in the cloud; Salesforce owns that space. But with a bit of creativity, you’ll see that the underlying Force.com platform is where the real power is, especially for extending CRM to your customers. The good news? Salesforce CRM is part of Force.com, so everything is seamless. The catch? There genuinely isn’t one, simply the need for a little upfront ingenuity.

Here’s a demo. We’ve used Force.com Sites and custom content management in Salesforce to create an interactive corporate website, entirely in the cloud. Everything you see here is pure Force.com, with no third party tools or extra licences required.