A headline theme for our next webinar will be ‘Microsoft Private Cloud 2.0′.

Private Cloud Application Platform

Two years ago I described an upcoming market that I initially defined as the Private Cloud Application Platform.

Recently Microsoft began prosecuting this space with their PCSS initiative, the Private Cloud Solutions Suite, bringing together a partner group that enables the PCAP I described, wrapping lots of value around the core MS suite of Hyper-V and System Centre.

This really starts to get the right ingredients for the real secret sauce to the Private Cloud story.

As we have all gathered, simply implementing yet more virtualization is hardly a new story for the enterprise data-centre so instead to really make it cook we need a full implementation of all aspects of the Cloud, internally, in particular both PaaS and SaaS – Platform and Software as a Service.

This combination of additional capabilities through this partner mix makes this possible.

Salesforce 2.0 – Your own Infopedia Private Cloud

Furthermore to connect this story to some real business value that users will be able to relate to, we can suggest a headline focus of ‘Private Cloud 2.0′.

This means blending this platform with social media aspects, to improve productivity of staff in the same way this Private SaaS is doing so for software developers.

Cloud 2.0 is a concept we describe that refers to this intersection between Crowdsourcing social media business models with Cloud Computing services, which is internalizing the public social media Cloud in the same way the first private intranets did so for the public web.

As a reference example Microsoft themselves are the perfect poster child.

Like many of their customers Microsoft adopted Sharepoint on a large-scale basis to improve knowledge collaboration through an Enterprise 2.0 strategy, but the result for them was also the same – A somewhat chaotic proliferation of sites and content that hindered rather than helped their important processes like Sales.

So they turned to a platform they acquired in 2008, the FAST Search engine, which has now been wholly absorbed into the Sharepoint platform, and they leveraged the enormous power of this tool to create a new Infopedia environment, a platform for “Salesforce 2.0″ if you will. Read more in their own case study here.

This immediately begs the question So how can we repeat this for ourselves, immediately teeing up the value of a Private Cloud.

The fundamental value of Cloud can always be defined by asking “What powerful technologies could be made more accessible to our users via the SaaS architecture, that they currently cannot do so due to overly complex software?” – Many, like FAST, offer huge benefits but are simply so difficult to implement they remain out of reach.

Cloud brings them within reach, and the same effect can be applied internally by IT teams as they can externally by Cloud Providers. In the original PCAP article I describe how Private SaaS Clouds will engender a modular, business process-centric approach to enterprise IT architecture, rather than a single big monolith, and carving up slices of the FAST Search engine to be applied to Sharepoint app farms is one example.

So for our webinar we will focus on this value-driving scenario of Infopedia-enabled Salesforce 2.0 capability, and examine how the Private Cloud 2.0 platform can implement software like FAST in a multi-tenant mode and scalable for multiple departments to use via a Private SaaS architecture.