Software in the Cloud: What to know about Intellectual Property and the Hosting Evolution

By Markus Latzel, CEO Palomino Inc.

Today more than ever, hosting service providers are ultimately responsible for hosting and safe-keeping our client's creative assets, application source code and customer databases. Often, these assets are jointly developed with custom solution providers such as Palomino Inc. and tightly configured to operate for highest performance on the hosting provider's specific infrastructure setup.

In too many of these 3-way relationships, proper intellectual property arrangements are not in place, resulting in unnessessary risks for all involved; and the current move towards cloud hosting only complicates this even more.

Joining a panel of experts on North America's largest hosting industry conference, I would like to discuss some of the issues and pitfalls of managing the relationship between client, HSP, and solution provider, with a specific view on intellectual property management and protection.

"While lawyers and legislators will understandably look to past uses of technology to guide them in drafting contracts and laws, cloud computing is sufficiently different to require more significant thought than other evolutions. From a legal perspective, cloud computing is an evolution, rather than a revolution, in computing technologies." - Hosting Con, 2010

In my mind, most hosting companies will have to have a sharp look at their service level agreements (SLAs) and custom service provision contracts in order to provide the certainty and data security our clients are looking for. This inevitably means that low-level infrastructure providers (space, power, connectivity) will need to follow suit if they seek to re-new their contracts.

I believe that we are at an evolutionary turning point, where just "providing service with a rich feature set" is no longer good enough, and SLA quality is becoming an extremely important decision factor for both solution providers like Palomino Inc. as well as our clients.

I am looking forward to discuss your views at the conference!

For more information:

• HostingCon Event Schedule
• Attending HostingCon and Registration
• Follow us on Twitter to get event updates: @palominoinc

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