Enterprises are also starting to work through the issues of tablet-based collaboration, and interestingly that’s one of the things RIM is expected to try to exploit. A tablet is most valuable as a collaborative tool for “corridor warriors,” in what my research identified as supervisory intervention applications rather than team activities.

In supervisory collaboration, a worker seeks approval or answers on a particular issue, an issue normally represented as a document or an application screen. The process demands that the supervisory/support person share the document/application context and simultaneously discuss the problem. Thus you need voice and data together.

Some tablet vendors and media types have suggested that video collaboration is the answer—tablets have the cameras after all. The problem is that video takes a lot of capacity, people don’t like random video calls that intrude on their current context, and there’s no evidence that video helps paired relationships be more productive.

Voice is the answer, but how exactly do we use collaborative voice with tablets? RIM’s answer is likely to be by creating a tight link between the tablet and a Blackberry, and that may be a good approach. We’ve noted this issue in some enterprise comments on the difference between iPhones on AT&T and the same phone on Verizon; the collaborative multi-tasking support is better on the first than on the second.

First, the revenue impact of the decision isn’t significant on its face, because Oracle will treat EC2 virtual machines just like customer virtual machines; the same license terms and rules apply. So what we’re seeing here is a model to accept infrastructure as a cloud service rather than to promote public cloud-based enterprise apps in Software as a Service form. But why even do that? I think that Oracle is realizing that the hybrid cloud is its path to enterprise prominence, and in particular a path leading past HP in a competitive sense.

Another factor is that Oracle’s database appliances are selling strongly. These appliances provide database management systems (DBMS) as a service, and thus could make it much more practical to have a cloud application access an on-premises database with reasonable performance. Thus you could argue that the hybrid cloud model is perfect to socialize Oracle’s appliances in a market that already seems to be catching on to their value.