Today at Intel’s CES 2012 Keynote, the firm announced a strategic partnership with Nuance. If you’ve forgotten, Nuance is a voice recognition company, so yelling at your new ultrabook may be a closer reality than you thought.

You’ll have voice commands for checking in on notifications, and the processing never has to go through the cloud since ultrabooks will provide enough processing power to begin with.

According to the Nuance boss, responses will be spoken back in natural language and the program will provide for up to nine different languages, including English, French, German Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Portuguese, and Mandarin.

They also mentioned that the power is there to eventually enable real-time language translation.

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VMware, whose core products specialize in virtualizing Windows and Linux workloads, is making some interesting maneuvers in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space with their Cloud Foundry offering.

a href=”http://www.cloudfoundry.com”>CloudFoundry.com is a hosted PaaS solution, in which people can deploy and run their web apps without ever mucking around with the underlying OS or application stack. There’s also the Micro Cloud Foundry, which is a virtual machine image you can deploy on your own hardware to set up your own Cloud Foundry PaaS. Going even further, the software that powers Cloud Foundry is open source and available on GitHub under an Apache Software License, so anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of PaaS can check it out.

It’s extremely interesting to me that VMware, a company that makes gobs of money by selling complex proprietary software, has so boldly embraced the free software development model for their PaaS offering. It’s also worth noting that the other major Linux PaaS offering, Red Hat’s OpenShift, is not yet open source.

While OpenShift is an all-Linux PaaS, and Microsoft’s Azure is an all-Windows PaaS, Cloud Foundry extends VMware’s overall OS agnosticism. The default offering is Linux, but recent additions to their product have added .NET support.

The long-term value of .NET in Cloud Foundry remains to be seen, since you still need to provide your own legal licenses for Microsoft Windows for each instance (in the parlance of Cloud Foundry: an execution agent or “DEA”) you might deploy; but I think it’s an impressive testament to VMware’s Cloud Foundry design. Because Cloud Foundry runs on Linux but manages Windows-based DEAs the same as any other DEA, developers will have a common model for deploying and scaling both Java and .NET applications, as well the newer frameworks supported by Cloud Foundry.

If you’re a heterogeneous environment, Cloud Foundry offers a one-stop shop for handling diverse workloads.

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Asana wants its task-list tool to feel so simple that you only encounter complexity when it’s useful. In other words, the opposite of how most enterprise software feels. And it has just added a little new piece of complexity in the form of a feature that lets you sync tasks to calendars. The result is that users have to make smarter decisions about which tasks matter most, which should end up helping their productivity.

The feature looks obvious enough. A drop-down in the project menu lets you syndicate any task with a due date to apps like Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. Select the sync option, and you can either click to add to Gcal, or click the URL to add to iCal, Outlook or other services. You can then use your calendar app to fine-tune things like how often you sync.

But there’s more going on. The core interface lets you create projects for different sets of task lists, and within that, creating any task is as simple as hitting return on a project page then writing a few words. The date-creation option is purposefully buried in a window to the right of the list, that you need to click on to open. This means that if you create a calendar date for the task, it’ll be because date is going to be pretty important for whatever the task is. The importance of the date implies that you’re going to want to track it carefully.

The new calendar-syncing feature reinforces the value of adding dates by only letting you sync entire projects. Does any given task really matter enough to appear on your general calendar, or is it so nebulous that it shouldn’t even have a date?

The end result is a better process for keeping track of what matters than just using a calendar. And there’s an added bonus for people like me who don’t think too highly of the date creation and task features in the calendar apps we use (by which I mean iCal’s frustrating new interface). Now I can see the dates for important tasks show up on my calendar without actually having to enter them.

There’s not much to complain about with Asana’s version, although I think it could use a little more complexity. The main thing I’d like is a way to schedule a specific task down to the minute and hour if necessary. Right now all tasks are just for the full day, so they’ll appear at the top of each day within calendar apps. For a few important tasks, the timing matters too much to gloss over. I’d also like a way to schedule some tasks to repeat by week or month.

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Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service offering has been in public beta for a while now. It offers a fairly simple way for people to jumpstart “cloud” development efforts by abstracting out all the messy business of setting up application and database servers. Instead, you simply publish your source code to OpenShift, and their platform does the rest. Supported languages are those used heavily by nimble, agile startup types: PHP, Python, Ruby. Interestingly, OpenShift also supports Java. That’s not a language that many people associate with cloud solutions. Today, Red Hat is announcing that they’re improving their support of Java on OpenShift with support for “full Java lifecycle for developers”.

I spoke with Issac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master (a groovy title, if ever there was one) and Jason Anderson, from Red Hat’s middleware team, about the announcement. According to Roth, OpenShift has always aimed to support those technologies used by open source developers — usually the “P” in the LAMP stack, as well as Ruby. But Red Hat also wants to support enterprise developers, and wants to help enterprise developers get working on cloud solutions using their preferred language. They’re doing that in a couple of ways, with today’s announcement.

First, OpenShift is getting integration into JBoss Tools, their Eclipse-based Java development environment, “allowing developers to easily push their code to the cloud from the leading Java IDE. Future integration is also planned for JBoss Developer Studio.” I asked Roth about OpenShift integration with other IDEs, and he assured me that work was underway. Indeed, Cloud IDE should work with OpenShift right now.

The ability to push an app to a platform from your IDE isn’t the only new feature being announced. Red Hat is also working to minimize the pain of building Java apps. OpenShift is adding support for Maven to help streamline the dependency resolution process, and Jenkins to provide “build as a service” functionality.

According to Roth, this is a push to allow Java developers to do everything “in the cloud”: code, build, and scale. Java app developers can focus on their apps, and not worry about the infrastructure. The addition of Maven allows developers to get away from manually wrangling library dependency installations for their apps, and in some cases may avoid the use of Ant scripts altogether. Jenkins support helps developers iterate quickly, and the existing OpenShift platform handles scalability.

When I think of Java apps, I usually think of monolithic corporate apps that communicate with corporate databases and directory services. I don’t think of cloud apps. So I asked Roth and Anderson who was driving this push at OpenShift. Specifically, what customers were saying to Red Hat “Gosh, I wish we could build our Java apps in the cloud!” They declined to discuss customer specifics, but did share that Red Hat is eating its own dogfood by deploying several content portals and mobile app backends with Java on OpenShift.

It’s not entirely surprising that Red Hat is driving Java in the cloud. After all, they own JBoss, one of the major Java middleware offerings in use today. While OpenStack’s Java support is currently limited to JBoss AS, the community-driven version (like Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux), we can probably expect to see JBoss EAP support in the not-too-distant future. Moreover, there are few PaaS offerings on the market today, save maybe for Microsoft Azure. Most folks seem to be focusing on infrastructure as a service, so the move toward PaaS opens up some interesting new opportunities.

OpenShift is currently free to use, with some modest limits on application size and scalability. If you’re a developer, why not take it for a spin?

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Backupify, the startup that provides online data backup, archiving and export, is today releasing a new version of its Backupify Snapshot tool with additional features for Google Apps admins. The tool, for those unfamiliar, allows Google Apps administrators to extract and download the complete Google Apps account for a departing company employ and save the data locally.

Previously, Snapshot was in public beta – it’s now being commercially released to all.

Traditionally, when an employee left an organization, the I.T. department would backup their files and folders, disable their Exchange mailbox and export their mailbox .PST file. Now, as companies of all sizes are transitioning to the cloud, termination procedures on the I.T. side have also changed. Unfortunately, because there’s not a simple process for exporting and archiving a user’s Google Apps data, companies will often just keep the account open but unused. That, however, can lead to an additional expense, as Google charges by seat.

With Backupify Snapshot, the idea is to recreate the same sort of account termination procedures companies are used to, but for cloud-based services. The tool compresses a user’s Google Apps account data (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Contacts and Sites) into a Zip file that can then be downloaded to a local machine or server. The Google Apps account can then be safely deleted.

The killer feature in today’s release is the added support for multi-user and batch downloading – that will be a huge timesaver for I.T. during those times when there’s more than one employee account to export. (Layoffs, anyone?)

Snapshot also improved support for large organizations via better search, introduced a referral functionality that will dole out free downloads for those who refer their friends and added Google Checkout as a payment option. (Snapshot users get only 5 free downloads, then have to pay $10 per download).

Backupify Snapshot is available both as a standalone service and as a part of Backupify’s Google Apps Backup service. It has been used by over 500 organizations since its release last month.

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Austin, Texas-based startup Spanning launched a new version of its Google Apps backup service today, which now includes business-grade backup for Gmail. Previously, the company provided backup for other Google Apps products, including Google Calendar, Docs, and Contacts, but, says, Spanning Cloud Apps founder and CEO Charlie Wood, “Gmail backup has been, by far, the most requested capability from our existing customer base.”

But Google Apps is already in the cloud – why do you need to back it up?

According to the company, even a company of Google’s size can have issues leading to data deletions. And not all data deletions are Google’s fault – sometimes, the end users themselves are to blame. Then what do you do? User-deleted data isn’t Google’s problem, so it can’t (and won’t) help you recover.

Businesses, particularly the small-to-medium sized companies which currently comprise the majority of Spanning’s target market, still need to be assured that their mission-critical data is securely backed up, whether it’s in the cloud or not.

What’s interesting about Spanning’s backup product is that it doesn’t require businesses to maintain their own servers, nor does it utilize its own servers for data storage. Given that the company is still a startup, and could be prone to its own issues and failures, that latter item is a much-needed assurance.

Instead, Spanning stores data on Amazon’s Web Services, using a combination of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3 and Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provide 99.999999999% durability.

Spanning backs up data incrementally, and doesn’t overwrite the old backups with new ones. Restorations are made possible from a simple-to-use interface. And it respects user permissions so that I.T. can’t view the file’s contents, they can only restore files when deleted.

In addition, the Spanning Backup site, application, and Google Apps Marketplace listings are certified for privacy and security by TRUSTe, the leading online privacy solutions provider. It’s  also certified under the US-EU and US-Swiss SafeHarbor Frameworks.

Wary consumers can also use Spanning to backup their own Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Contacts, too, if so inclined. It’s only $3/month for an individual account vs. $2.50/per user/per month for businesses. But consumers are not Spanning’s main focus. It’s more interested in providing businesses (SMB up to Enterprise) with a cloud backup solution.

Spanning had previously raised $2 million in funding from the Foundry Group back in April. It competes with a very similar service from Backupify, but slightly undercuts them on pricing – $2.50/per user/per month vs. Backupify’s $3/per user/per month. It also hopes to capitalize on Backupify’s growing pains, we imagine.

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Salesforce’s ‘social network for the enterprise’ Chatter has been the company’s first real foray into incorporating social with business functions. Salesforce originally announced Chatter back in November of 2009, and the application launched into public beta in June 2010 after four months in private beta. Salesforce has said publicly that Chatter has been its most successful product launch to date, even spending millions on a Super Bowl ad for Chatter. And recently Salesforce rolled out a new, more Facebook-like version and made the application free for users, with premium features as an optional add-on. And today, in conjunction with the company’s Dreamforce conference (the theme of which is the social enterprise); Salesforce is debuting a brand new Chatter complete with realtime chat, support for customer groups, a new API, and a brand new HTML5 mobile app.

Social Strategy

As Al Falcione, Salesforce’s VP of Product Marketing, tells me there are three main components to a company’s strategy for social enterprise. First, the company has to develop a social customer profile, which captures a company’s likes on Facebook, Twitter communications, connections on LinkedIn and more. Basically, customers want social insight into the web presence of potential company they are working with.

Second, a company needs to develop and employee social network, where a company’s employees can exchange internal, realtime communications and collaborate on work. And third, Salesforce believes that companies need to develop a Customer Social Network and a Product Social Network. Customer social networks allow companies listen to and engage with customers in an entirely on social channels like Facebook and Twitter. And companies can also bring their products into social networks so they can be part of the conversation, allowing consumers to not just “fan” a product, but become its “friend’”

Chatter

And these premises are the basis for what Chatter has become in this iteration of the ‘Facebook for the enterprise.’ Salesforce Chatter is debuting ‘Chatter Now,’ which adds realtime chat into the applications. Chatter users will be able to collaborate with colleagues, directly in Chatter and see when their colleagues are online (similar to the way you can see your Gmail contacts online), chat with them and share their screen without leaving their Chatter feed. In fact, the whole Chatter experience resembles a cross between Facebook and Gmail.

Another new feature that will be added in the next version of Chatter is the ability to create private, social groups for customer interactions. So Chatter users will be able to invite people outside of their organization into their Chatter network to collaborate in these private, secure groups. Within these groups you can share files, comment and more. To invite a client into a group, you can simply send an email invite which will contain a secure link.

Lastly, Salesforce wants to allow Microsoft Sharepoint and others users to leverage their files inside Chatter and bring collaboration to files in Sharepoint. Companies will be able to embed Chatter feeds in a SharepointMySite or TeamSite and share documents from Sharepoint to Chatter. And ‘Chatter Connect’ makes other third-party applications social by extending Chatter into other applications, such as intranets and portals, custom mobile apps and other enterprise apps.

Mobile And HTML5

Similar to many consumer applications like Pandora, Salesforce is leveraging the power of HTML5 to provide a rich mobile experience to users. ‘Touch.salesforce.com’ is a new mobile site that has been built using the latest HTML5 technology, and will allow for cross-platform access for all of Salesforce’s applications in the cloud, including Chatter, the Service Cloud, CRM and more. And all 220,000 custom apps built on Force.com will be mobile with touch.salesforce.com.

As Falcione explained social networking and mobile web use is so prevalent in the consumer everyday experience, it makes sense that these actions will bleed into the work environment. And this is much easier accomplished in the cloud. The newest version of Chatter, with private work groups, realtime chat, screen sharing and more aims to replicate some of the features offered by Skype, Gmail, Facebook and others.

The social enterprise is no longer an afterthought for many companies; and we may be at the cusp of a huge movement (that is worth more than $1 billion in revenue) that is even bigger than creating the ‘Facebook for the enterprise.’

The major question is how many ‘social enterprise’ applications do we need in the enterprise, and will there be a few players who dominate the space, similar to the way Facebook and twitter dominate the social consumer space. Jive just filed for a $100 million IPO, Yammer is growing, and there is some consolidation already taking place. We know Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff is extremely bullish on social and will continue to put resources into Chatter and the company’s social strategy. I’m sure we’ll hear more about Salesforce’s social plans tomorrow at Dreamforce, but it should be interesting to see how the space evolves over time.

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After adding online payments exec Bill Ready as an Executive-In-Residence, Accel Partners is shoring up another area of expertise with the addition of former Salesforce.com executive Chuck Ganapathi as the firm’s newest Entrepreneur-in-Residence. At Accel, Ganapathi, who was the creator of Salesforce’s “Facebook for the Enterprise” Chatter, will focus on developing a company in the social enterprise space.

Prior to joining Accel, Ganapathi served as Senior Vice President of Products for Chatter and Mobile at Salesforce.com, leading the company’s product development efforts in enterprise social networking. Not only was Chatter Salesforce’s first real foray into social, but the platform has been lauded as the company’s most successful product release ever.

During that time, Ganapathi led the acquisitions of two start-ups: Dimdim, a real-time collaboration platform, and GroupSwim, a community platform with semantic filtering technology. He also led the integration of the acquired technology and teams from two file sharing and collaboration start-ups, Koral and SlideAware.

Ganapathi also ran Salesforce’s sales automation product, Sales Cloud, which makes up one of the company’s major revenue streams. Prior to his 5 year tenure at Salesforce, Ganapathi spent 6 years at Siebel Systems, where he was the founding product manager of their first internet application, Siebel eChannel. He also ran the company’s eCommerce and order management product line.

As an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners, Ganapathi will evaluate and incubate new business opportunities created by the intersection of social and mobile technologies in the enterprise.

Clearly Ganapathi has significant expertise in the enterprise software industry, and has had a particular focus in social areas of late. While Ganapathi didn’t reveal any specifics on what he will be building while at Accel, he shared his view that he believes social enterprise applications like Chatter are just the beginning of a long-term trend.

“Just as we went from on-premise software to cloud computing, there will be a similar move for social enterprise,” Ganapathi explains. Of course, there are a number of more mature and dominant companies that have emerged in the social enterprise space such as Jive and Yammer, and many social enterprise companies are getting bought. One could argue that there may not be more room left for new players.

But Ganapathi says that there are certain areas that are changing and are ripe for innovation, including how to translate conversations taking place in the work environment into productivity, and the transition in the distribution models in SaaS.

So how does the social enterprise fit into Accel’s longterm strategy? Partner Kevin Efrusy, who attended Stanford’s business school with Ganapathi, explains that one of cornerstones to the venture firm’s investment strategy has been furthering opportunities built on top of social web. Accel bet on social games with Playfish, social commerce with Groupon, and most recently, social recruiting with BranchOut.

Now, he explains, the time is right for a movement in the social and mobile enterprise space, and Accel decided to incubate an idea in-house. He adds that Ganapathi’s expertise and ‘technical depth’ made him the ideal person to execute this vision.

And the incubation/EIR model has seen success within Accel in the past. Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop, was also incubated within Accel. And Couchbase, a NoSQL data base company, was also developed in-house.

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Live@edu is a web-based productivity suite for students, staff, faculty and alumni, which includes E-mail and calendars with a 10GB inbox, 25 GB of additional file storage, document sharing, instant messaging, video chat, mobile e-mail, and Office Web Apps. Currently more than 10,000 schools in more than 130 countries have deployed Live@edu.

Today, Microsoft is announcing a number of new schools joining the platform including San Francisco State University; California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; and State Center Community College District as well as University of Montana, Northern Kentucky University the College of DuPage, and Washington University in St. Louis and Aston University in the United Kingdom.

In some new deployments, Microsoft is actively targeting the differences in offerings from Google Apps. For example, Microsoft said that Northern Kentucky University selected Live@edu after evaluating Google Apps Education Edition and deciding Live@edu is better for the school’s needs in terms of storage.

There are a couple of reasons why the educational space is so attractive for both Microsoft and Google. Not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for both cloud-based productivity platforms, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. The students at these schools are potential life-long users of Microsoft or Google’s products.

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Salesforce Chatter, which was originally announced last November, was launched into public beta in June after four months in private beta. In the realtime collaboration platform’s first three months open to the public, Chatter has been adopted by 20,000 companies; with 25 percent of Salesforce’s client base using the platform.

Chatter was launched as a platform to deliver realtime access to data and information, using social sources, such as YouTube and Twitter. Similar to interactions on Facebook, employees can create business profiles with professional information like personal contact data, area of expertise, and work history. Searching other people’s profiles, colleagues can quickly identify individuals who are relevant to their enterprise needs. Users can post status updates to share communications, files and links around a project, sales deal or customer support case. And users can see realtime feeds of personalized updates from people, applications and documents.

Chatter 2 takes this further, adding a number of new social features that one might see on a consumer-focused social network. The new version includes Filters, which allows them to filter their feeds by people and records they follow to find relevant posts. Chatter Topics allows employees to associate their updates with other posts and comments on the same topic by using a hashtag (#). Combined with Chatter Search, employees can find updates and comments that match any Chatter topic.

Chatter Recommendations give employees suggestions of colleagues to follow and groups to join. Chatter will recommend people based on criteria such as connections in common, number of followers, and management hierarchy. Similarly, public groups are recommended based on their popularity and relevance to that employee.

One important update is Chatter Search, which now gives users the ability to search across every Chatter feed, file, profile, update and comment in realtime. And employees will be able to receive a daily or weekly e-mail digest of the latest Chatter posts from their feed or group feeds.

Now employees can participate in Chatter via an Adobe AIR-powered desktop app, which has all the same funcrionality as the web app. The app, however, will display pop-up alerts at the bottom of the computer screen so employees are instantly notified of updates.

Admins can now create analytics reports and dashboards on Chatter usage in their company across users and their followers, feeds, comments, groups, members, and group comments. And employees can store, update, and share documents, presentations, photos and media files with a designated Chatter File app. Users can also follow reports and receive updated in their feed.

Dashboard Chatter allows employees to funnel additional information, including sales and close rates, into their realtime feeds. With an activity app, employees can track the progress of important tasks and get notifications on calendar and meeting updates. Activity Chatter also allows employees to collaborate with colleagues on customer calls and meeting agendas.

Chatter is free for all paying user subscriptions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com, with Chatter-only user licenses available for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition for $15 per user. Chatter is also releasing mobile apps for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and the new iPod touch are currently scheduled to be available in late 2010. Chatter Mobile for Android devices is currently scheduled to be available in the first half of 2011.

While Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff has been quick to denounce Chatter as an enterprise social network, it sure looks and feels like one. And with this release the company has been open about taking features from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks and applying them to Chatter. Kraig Swensrud, VP of marketing, tells me that “Chatter 2 is heavily inspired by Facebook and Twitter.”

Clearly features like recommendations, a desktop app and or the addition of hashtags are ways to make the platform seem more like the networks, i.e. Facebook and Twitter, that employees socialize for their personal relationships

Chatter, says the company, is the fastest growing product in the history of Salesforce. Earlier this spring, Salesforce launched an app marketplace for Chatter, called ChatterExchange. Now there are over 55 apps on the app exchange, says Swensrud

As Benioff states: “The momentum behind Salesforce Chatter is astounding…The excitement we see from the industry and our customers is proof that the feed is the new desktop.”

Of course now that Chatter is officially a social network (or at least looks like one), it will also face competition from the other players in space, which include Yammer, Jive, Bantam Live, SocialText, and SuccessFactor’s CubeTree.

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