Monday marks the launch of a new program at RackSpace called OpenStack. At base, it is adopting the principles of open source as expressed in Apache 2. That means that it is “open sourcing” the code that powers its storage product (CloudFiles) and will soon make the whole shootin’ match involved in the middleware and runtime software underlying CloudServers.

In this post Scoble himself calls it “the end of lock in” for the companies and individuals that have come to depend on RackSpace to for cloud-based storage or application hosting. But implicit in the announcement is the idea that a RackSpace customer will have dozens of peers that are using the software and are willing to share refinements, improvements, executables and (basically) experience with a community of other customers. Based on Scoble’s post, the company things of this as an extension of its high-quality customer service, spiced up with the rhetroric surrounding open source’s ability to counter vendor vendor lock-in.

My own belief is that RackSpace has learned as much from watching IBM as it has from listening to the “voice of the customer.” Its management recognizes that there’s a time to declare victory and turn control of the market over to its core customers with the understanding that they will benefit from being extremely “partner friendly” during this time of architectural uncertainty. It is a brilliant, and pre-emptive move.

As asymmetrical marketing specialist Joe Bentzel notes on his new Cloudwagon blog, EMC has another “family of products” carrying the VMWare brand, that position it to be the “poster child” for the next generation of software superpowers. EMC well-knows that its success both in virtualized storage and application orchestration depends on how well it works with others, as well as the opportunities it creates for its partners whose main lines of business are application development and integration. Joe calls the new area of opportunity “Superpower 2.0″. As I’ll be pointing out in the coming months and years, it is also fertile ground for Recombinant Communications, mostly because a the approach taken by EMC, both through Atmos and VMWare provide the level of flexibility and agility required for successful RC implementations.

As illustrated on the Microsoft Azure Web site, the folks in Redmond are making a direct attack on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud platform, but doing so in a way that has explicit hooks into the latest .Net application framework. The special sauce is the Azure Platform AppFabric, as described here. Its intent is to make it easy for Web services developers to combine, integrate and/or federate resources and services regardless of location (on premises or in the cloud).

I mentioned Bing Maps in the first graph of this post because Microsoft is using Tech-Ed to launch a new Bing Map App Software Development Kit (SDK) with the expressed purpose of encouraging developers to build location-aware applications “on top of” Bing Maps. A new Bing Maps API, made generally available later this year, will enable developers to build more robust “mashups” that, at a minimum, will incorporate real time information (Tweets, blog posts, photos, search results) as overlays of the maps, satellite views and street views that have been fodder for some very eye-catching demos in the past few months.

Attendees were also excited to learn that, for the first time, Microsoft was unveiling the full list of features for both Microsoft Office Communications Server (Version 14) and the latest Exchange Service Pack. According to a company press release, “Key new features in this release include expert search, Office document and application sharing, and one-click meeting access from Outlook, SharePoint and mobile phones.” None of that sounds particularly new, but it is always nice to see OCS getting some props and exposure among a broader set of IT professionals and developers.

Speech processing, call processing and multimodal communications got little or no attention in the pre-conference promotion. Instead, Microsoft applied the Law of Large Numbers to puff up the importance of its announcements (which admittedly fall in the shadow of the announcement of a new iPhone). The importance of Azure is in its reach. As Microsoft explains, Azure is one of “the world’s largest cloud services — with more than 600 million unique users on MSN, 4 billion Bing search queries monthly, more than 500 million active Windows Live IDs, 20 million users of the rapidly growing Xbox Live gaming service, and 40 million paid users of Microsoft Online Services across 9,000 business customers and more than 500 government entities. Thousands of customers in more than 40 countries have moved to production environments with Windows Azure, an Internet-scale cloud computing services platform hosted in Microsoft datacenters.”

Azure is not quite Google (in scale or feature set) and it’s not quite Amazon.com’s EC2 in terms of support of ecommerce functions and back-ending IP-telephony switches and apps (think Asterisk, Twilio, Tropo…). Yet it is destined to play a very important role as part of the interstitial fabric among multiple enterprises for application sharing, conferencing and collaboration. There’s a long row to hoe, if it aims to make a mark in mobile commerce or the fast-growing world of IP-based, multi-modal communications. Then again, there’s no better place to get things started than a partners’ conference with over 10,000 attendees.

Google has also opened up Wave, meaning that prospective users no longer have to wait for someone to invite them to jump in among the long-time Wavers. This means that the platform has become stable enough for its keepers to have confidence in its ability to scale. As an early invitee, I’ll be watching closely to see whether the timing (in the wake of Facebook’s privacy faux pas), combined with the enthusiasm of new entrants will make it a better (or at least busier) platform for collaboration and sharing.

The most interesting development may be the one that’s deepest in the multimedia communications weeds. It is the WebM Project WebM Project, an effort led by Google, Mozilla and Opera and endorsed by the likes of Skype, Broadcom, ARM, Logitech, MIPS and about thirty other firms. The product is a “royalty free” software codec that supports high-quality video and is rumored to ship “free of charge” with a future download of Flash Player. A friction-free, easily downloadable renderer of high quality video generated understandable levels of enthusiasm from the application generating public.

Other noteworthy announcements from Google I/O were more evolutionary in nature. Cloud computing giant, VMWare announced that it is jointly launching the Google AppEngine in VMWare’s “public cloud”. As Vic Gundotra (VP of Engineering at Google) explains in this summary post, in conjunction with the introduction of the Google App Engine for Business, there are now more options than ever for application developers to shop for application piece parts across multiple, virtual sources with confidence that they will still be operating on rock solid platforms (certified in some cases by VMWare).

Today was all about HTML5 and the cloud as a platform. Tomorrow promises to be just as inspirational and, we’ve been told, will have more of a focus on mobility and mobilization.

According to its press release, IBM believes that businesses are already spending $46 billion on cloud-based solutions. Without citing specific sources, it sees a 28% annual growth rate to $126 billion in 2012. Cast Iron has built its business, to a certain degree on vendor neutrality. Its Web site is emblazoned with links that promote interconnection between and among Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Apps.

Given that some assembly is always required, the acquisition should provide plenty of revenue opportunities for the integration specialists at IBM Global Services, but the focus appears to be on IBM giving its customers the ability to do their own integration. As explained by Craig Hayman, the General Manager of IBM’s Websphere Group, IBM’s customers can “integrate business applications, no matter where those applications reside. This will give clients greater agility and as a result, better business outcomes.”

This sort of agile assembly of solutions that combine widgets and other re-usable sets of code wherever they may be found is at the heart of Recombinant Communications. It recognizes that employees at many business enterprises have become impatient with the pace at which new features and functions can be introduced that extend Web services to their desktops, laptops, smartphones or other mobile devices. In the age of “I’d rather do it myself”, they will find companies like IBM and its technology partners giving them the green light and companies like Cast Iron Systems giving them confidence that resources in the cloud can operate at the levels of efficiency and reliability required for enterprise-grade computing and communications.

In this article in InformationWeek, David Berlind points out that Google Docs already claims some 25 million users in 2 million companies. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to sort out its strategy for moving its Office Suite into the cloud, in concert with installations of Sharepoint or Office Communications Server or some other configuration. Meanwhile, companies plow ahead with their own solutions that are a mix-and-match set of PC-based, private cloud and public cloud-based resources.

The prospective applications go far beyond remote banking. As Voxeo explains, the Tropo platform now enables Web application developers to add all the multiple channels mentioned above to their existing applications. For instance, Tropo will enable them to give self-service apps a Twitter name and customers can contact it simply by Tweeting.

In today’s announcement, Voxeo highlighted an expansion of its international footprint by making it possible to dial into the Tropo cloud using “local” numbers in 30 different countries. In terms of languages supported for spoken input and output, the platform covers US English, UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Mexican Spanish or Castilian Spanish.

Voxeo Labs continues to provide the Recombinant Communications community with free access to its development environment, by featuring direct-API and JSON-based development interfaces without a fee. Users pay only when applications are put into production.

The resemblance to Facebook was striking and, we were told, quite intentional. Just as Facebook, with its most recent redesign, made its core “LiveFeed” into a clone of Twitter, Salesforce has given its core Web-based CRM service into a clone of Facebook. The customary heirarchy of tabs, which include “Accounts”, “Contacts”, “Opportunities” and the like, had recently been augmented with links to Twitter feeds. But that’s all going to be a thing of the past as new tabs appear to integrate profiles, groups, status updates, feeds and input from both Twitter and Facebook.

Since sales personnel tend to be competitive, the prospect of using Chatter for collaborative sales may not be as great as the use of Chatter in conjunction with broader marketing and customer support efforts. The service can illustrate trending topics just like Twitter and Facebook. It also has the ability to support “reputonics”, meaning that team members can assign trust levels and quality to other members and their posts or responses.

Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff described the service in his keynote address to DreamForce attendees. He said that it is in test mode among internal employees. But it is being made available to customers subscribing to Salesforce.com’s core CRM services at no extra charge (above the $50 per seat per month charge). The service as a stand-alone will cost $50 per seat per month.

More detail will be provided by product managers during the course of tomorrow’s sessions.

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For over a year, Aspect’s Unified Communications initiatives have been tightly linked with Microsoft OCS to replace (or virtualize) PBXs, conference bridges and interactive voice response (IVR) platforms. When speech applications are involved, they are to run in the remote server farms operated by Microsoft’s Tellme business unit. This approach has apparently left a gap in the strategy for deploying Aspect’s portfolio of workforce management and other contact center applications “in the cloud.” For the time being, VMWare will fill the gap nicely. The existing base of enterprise customers already deploying VMWare-based solutions makes a very good prospect base for Aspect.

The fact that Aspect has decided to partner with VMWare demonstrates that Microsoft will have to work hard to gain share of cloud based spending. We’re already witnessing a tremendous amount of innovative mashing up of telco, voice and self-service apps in clouds operated by Amazon, Voxeo and Angel.com (still part of MicroStrategy). VMWare is a much different animal because contact centers and phone applications are not considered its forte. Still, all of these solution providers justify their sales on the reduction in capex, opex and space requirements that result from virtualization.