An unseasonably wintery and very cold London played host on the 30th November to the Business Cloud Summit 2010, sponsored this year by, amongst others, IntraLinks, Microsoft, CSC, NetSuite, RightNow and Success Factors and attended by several hundred senior IT professionals, analysts and commentators drawn from a broad base of industries, the public sector, media and professional bodies.

This is the second year of the summit, one of the largest vendor independent cloud gatherings in the UK, a forum that serves the purpose of inter-industry networking as much as it reports out trends and discusses issues and, of course, provides a showcase for the propositions of the leading software authors and service providers in the space.

The latest in a series of IntraLinks sponsored, mergermarket M&A, Private Equity and Restructuring forums, the Benelux M&A and PE Forum was held in Amsterdam at the end of last month and I, together with our Regional Manager Marsja Meeus and our EMEA Head of Product Marketing, Axel Kirstetter, witnessed some highly respected speakers play down the prospects for rapid, or perhaps even sustained, recovery following ‘the worst crisis in living memory’.

The news is in: IntraLinks has won another customer service award!

This year's International Business Award for Best Customer Service Team recognizes the superlative performance of IntraLinks' Global Enterprise Services organization. The award will be collected by Denise Simpson at a star-studded ceremony at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, on the 14th September.

You know what's going to happen soon: The markets will rally. There will be a few false starts, but then there will be a sustained recovery. There's no doubt we're all looking forward to turning that corner but for some companies, predators loom in the distance. They have been biding their time, waiting for the perfect time to strike, and detailing every aspect of their plan.

Let's say a company has survived the recession, having made hard decisions and hunkering down. Perhaps that company will emerge only to be stalked-to be the target of a hostile takeover attempt. How did they prepare?

Most panic.

The defense: Create a poison pill? Repurchase stock? Spin off a division or two? Attract new bidders?

It seems that not a day goes by without a news story breaking concerning the leak, theft, interception or misplacement of critical information.

In just the last few weeks: