As a Tennessee Titans fan I’m still trying to decide whether to be happy or concerned at the acquisition of Randy Moss. Thoughts?

Anyway, on to the best of the week that was:

1. The vacation rental market is heating up and while Google hopes to get a piece with their investment in Homeaway, Pegasus and the VMRA have other ideas.  Even better is this piece by OpenTravel Alliance’s Valyn Perini.
2. Facebook enhances their platform for mobile with single-click sign on using Facebook Connect for mobile apps and opening up their Places API. With over 200M mobile Facebook users already (40% penetration) they don’t need to develop their own phone. They’re already available on every smartphone and many modestly intelligent feature phones. From a travel perspective, the important news is that they’re expanding their support for businesses to provide local deals as a reward for check-ins.
3. It’s always more fun to watch a good game of chicken from the sidelines. This one’s a doozy. American Airlines has threatened to remove all AA flights from Orbitz as of December 1. If it in fact happens, who do you think gets hurt worse?  J.P. Morgan Airlines analyst, Jamie Baker adds some insight into the financial implications.
4. Dell buys SaaS integration house Boomi. Kudos and great exit to Bob Moul, Rick Nucci and the other folks at Boomi. At first I didn’t see this as a great fit for Dell, but CloudAve’s Krishnan a reasonable explanation when he puts it in context with Dell’s acquisition of Perot Systems and their attempt to remake themselves as a services company like IBM and HP before them.  However, I’m still not convinced and think that Phil Wainwright may have the right perspective.
5. Robert Cole goes inside the numbers of Amadeus’ recent Travel Gold Rush 2020 report.
6. Is this the beginning of the social graph cold war? Facebook, which has been chastised for their sometimes lackadaisical position regarding the security/sharing of their members’ personal information, has become very much like the Hotel California – allowing data from third-party sources to come in, but it…or any other personal information…can never leave. Well I guess Google finally said “enough” and has stopped Facebook from allowing users to invite more friends to join by importing their Gmail contacts.
7. Everbread, a relatively new entrant to the flight search engine game announced 3 new clients for their Haystack product (almost a perfect product name, eh?). No disrespect to fellow Tnooz nodes, Stephen Ekbergh and Timothy O’Neill-Dunne, but while nice wins, Everbread still has yet to break through with any premier clients. But I guess at this point positive trends, not raw revenues are the best measure.
8. Good article talking about the value of multi-tenancy from a business alignment perspective, not merely a cost of operations point of view.
9. I think that we can all agree that Farelogix’s Jim Davidson is “not a witch”, but he is nothing if not combative. Another volley in his was with the GDS’ as he responds to Sabre’s 20 Questions.
10. What’s another billion to Larry? Oracle buys eCommerce player ATG to enhance m-Commerce play. Analysis from Forrester’s Brian Walker.

Geva Perry is starting a series called “The Purpose-Driven Cloud” where it appears that he’s trying to address the aforementioned question by evaluating a number of different attributes that are all technology-centric.  It looks like it should be a worthwhile discussion, although it’s mostly written from a developer’s point of view.

But I think his angle is missing some important elements (although in fairness they may get addressed along the way) that are more customer-driven and business-driven:

• Suitability to task: What is the kind of application that you have?  Is it primarily workflow and transaction oriented like an ERP application or are you doing heavy number crunching and using complex algrorithms like a pricing credit default swaps?  Some cloud platforms like Force.com are great for the former, but wouldn’t be good for the latter. And if you are accessing data frequently, cloud storage options like Amazon S3, might not be the right selection.
• Data and Code Portability: When you are deciding what cloud platform to select, you’re not just making that decision for yourself, you’re making it for your customers.  So choosing a platform that doesn’t lock you in to a proprietary codebase or where extracting the data is more of a challenge must be a primary consideration.  Nobody wants to be locked in.  Call it the ‘Hotel California’ effect.  Many companies are wary of the Force.com platform for this very reason, unless they’re building their product in order to take advantage of the Salesforce.com ecosystem.  Also, what kind of protections are you afforded via code escrow?  Think about the challenges that companies who built their businesses — don’t just think about building applications — on Coghead?  For many this was extremely challenging to their business and to some it was fatal.  there’s a financial stability aspect to this as well, so advantage to the mega-vendors like Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce.
• What Does Existing Code Look Like?: Let’s start out simply: do you have existing code?  If not your choices are much wider.  But if you’re heavily invested in .NET or Java, your choices may be clearer, because the migration path afforded to you will be faster.  And speed does count for a lot.  Here’s one area where Microsoft Azure will have a strong value proposition to existing Microsoft shops.
• Integration: According to Forrester Research, integration is a top concern of clients when selecting SaaS companies.  So does the platform you’re selecting make this challenge any easier on you?  With Force.com, AWS and OpSource Connect you have a lot of existing connectors and modules sitting at the ready that make solving the integration problem easier and significantly reduce the associated coding effort.  Of course there are integration platforms like Boomi and Pervasive Software that you can integrate into your application, but if all else is equal, why not go with the platform that has the integration built in?

What else did I miss?  Please let me know.