I Had lunch last week with drew clark, The lead strategy guy at IBM's Venture Capital Group (infoworld.com/43S1) based in Silicon Valley. Amid a lively discussion of VC trends around the globe (most startups seem commoditized from birth, Web 2.0 is becoming Enterprise 2.0, the flow of VC dollars continues unabated and is increasingly funneled to Asia), he coined a couple of phrases that I kind of liked. What sits on top of middleware? Not applications (which IBM presumably leaves to its partners), but... upperware! Drew touted the appeal of a Web-based marketplace for enterprise on-demand upperware that could run on top of a standard. Web-based utility infrastructure. And the perfect distribution vehicle for such modular components? Well, of course, Upperware Parties (my bad joke, not his).
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