No clouds in the sky today in Las Vegas… with CES underway,  Ray Mercedes from Panasonic Cloud  explained their cloud based phone system offerings for small and medium sized businesses.

The consumerization of the enterprise is a term more commonly used here in Silicon Valley - referring to enterprise software which is being hosted in the cloud and sold on a monthly fee versus an annual licence fee.

The Panasonic Cloud Service Pricing starts at $39.95 per month and offers businesses a real advantage on cashflow in these challenging economic times. Ray is leading the charge in this nationwide rollout in the USA for Panasonic Cloud.

This meeting would not have been possible without the super-human co-ordination skills of Mr. Raymond Norwood (the best dressed man in Brooklyn). Here’s a photo for you big guy…. we missed you!

As all software developers will tell you, getting in the zone is critical to execution. When I caught up with Jay McKinsey recently, we discussed the cloud and the requirements for helping clients manage product catalogs and dealer databases in the age of hyper growth e-commerce sales.

Like the sun shining off Half Dome at Yosemite National Park, the light only needs to shine on the software built at the right time to make it seem so perfect.

I wanted to let everyone know we use Egnyte.com here at SearchForecast for online file sharing between employees and business partners. As we have folks in Sydney, Pune, New York, Palo Alto, we find cloud file server provides a powerful solution.

We are also using Egnyte to auto-backup our computers and network each day which is very easy to administer. Check them out at www.egnyte.com - they make the cloud with a silver lining!