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I have been living in the Silicon Valley for a while, and sure enough I haven't forgotten the dot com days. A few days back, on my way to the San Francisco airport, I saw a billboard by aol advertising that they are cool (again!). I also observed that parking lots alongside 101 weren't that empty. I told myself "man! this does feel like 1999". The smart people - entrepreneurs, VCs, and analysts - that I talk to, tell me that we're in a bubble. They call it Bubble 2.0. Perhaps, they're right. The company valuations are through the roof. Facebook is valued around $75 billion and Color , on the launch day, had $40 million in the bank. The angel, super angel, and incubator investment deal flow is bringing all the talent to the Valley and all these young smart entrepreneurs are working on some of the coolest things that I have ever seen. But, there's a talent side that I am worried about. What this influx of easy venture capital has ensued is companies waging t

As many of you know, today marked the official launch of my first book - GovCloud: Cloud Computing for the Business of Government . Today's venue was the National Press Club in downtown Washington, DC. Known as "The Place Where News Happens", the locale was certainly fitting as cloud computing leaders from government and industry gave the audience an update on GovCloud's progress. The morning's highlight was the keynote presentation from Ms Dawn Leaf, NIST Senior Executive for Cloud Computing . Her presentation covered the universal cloud computing challenges and outlined how NIST's leadership is helping federal agencies effectively address them in turn. Insightful presentations were also provided by: Bob Gourley , Founder/Author CTO Vision and Former DIA CTO Brand Niemann , Director, Semantic Community and former Senior Enterprise Architect and Data Scientist, U.S. EPA Jerry Smith , Office of DoD Executive Agent for IT Standards; and Rob Williams, President

During my several interactions with - CIOs, senior IT leaders, and Line of Business (LoB) heads - I have firsthand observed the power struggle between LoB and IT and a slow but continuous tarnish in their relationship due to cloud and SaaS offerings. IT and LoB work for the same company but they build their little and in some cases huge empires within a company. Even if the end goal of a company is to leverage technology to gain competitive advantage, they all have orthogonal goals that appear to be conflicting from the outside. In a negotiation, it's imperative to recognize that both parties never want the same thing. It's about getting to a deal that's a win-win situation. Regardless of the kind of ISV you represent and who the buyer is, I suggest you make the both - IT as well as LoB - work in your favor. The ISVs that typically face these challenges fall into one of these three categories: 1) On-premise vendors that sell into IT find it difficult to compete against SaaS

Today I published my first post on Forbes.com !! At the invitation of Bruce Upbin , Forbes.com editor, I will be contributing posts monthly. I see this not only as an honor, but as an acknowledgement of the importance of the Federal shift to cloud. As I said in today's post , the government has long been known for it's glacial speed and risk avoidance culture. It's aggressive transformation, however, represents a surprising shift towards an information technology leadership role. Please join me on Forbes.com in discussing this important transformation with the broader business world!! ( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article , get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

Last week TechAmerica announced the formation of a " cloud computing commission " to advise the White House on the current plans to steer more than $20B worth of IT services toward the cloud computing model. Co-chaired by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and VCE CEO Michael Capellas, the commission will provide recommendations for how agencies should roll out cloud technologies and suggest changes to policies that might hinder attainment of the government's goals. While I applaud Tech America's efforts to help the government manage this important transition, my personal interest is more focused on the work being led by Bob Gourley at the Intelligence and National Security Alliance . The INSA Cloud Computing Task Force, as an element of the INSA Cyber Security Council, will focus on ways to enhance adoption of cloud computing for national security missions. According to the email announcing the formation of this group: " INSA mem