My blog today discusses the phenomenon of going mainstream. Can a B2B cloud-based platform for collaboration, such as IntraLinks, “go mainstream”? I would argue that it can. People, games and even business solutions can go mainstream in various ways — virally, as a result of a single, significant event and via a series of successes achieved over many years. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Few folks other than US-based swimming fans knew of Michael Phelps prior to the hyping around the 2008 Summer Olympics. Afterwards, with eight gold medals in tow, Phelps went mainstream and is now one of the most recognized athletes in the world. The 2008 Summer Games was Phelps’ single, significant event.

Just when you thought the Brazil M&A market couldn’t get any hotter—BAM!  We recently released our end of year and Q4 2010 Brazil IntraLinks Deal Flow Indicator (DFI) Report. If you’ve been following the market, you won’t be surprised  to learn that we reported a 35% increase in Brazil M&A deal activity in 2010 versus 2009. In just the last quarter of 2010 there was a 28% increase in deal activity in Brazil versus Q3 2010.

While I never put much stock into awards in the past, I now realize recognition is vital if for no other reason than it leads you to reflect on what you’ve accomplished and provides some useful perspective.

It all started about a month ago when IntraLinks began a sweep at the M&A Atlas Award ceremonies — winning awards in Asia, the Americas and Europe focused on recognizing leadership in M&A technology, specifically Virtual Data Rooms (VDRs). The three victories are meaningful because they come from the community of dealmakers who rely on VDRs everyday to do their jobs.

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.

I recently read an interesting series of blogs about mergers on The Wall Street Journal. I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with many of the points, particularly that each side involved in a merger wants to feel like they’ve received enough concessions from the other party and that this inevitably leads to all the lawyers involved in the process bringing lots of questions and issues to the table (and forcing them into the transaction agreements). It is only human nature after all for people to want to feel like they’ve accomplished as many wins as possible, no matter how minor they may be.

One issue that this series of blogs made me think about that wasn’t extensively covered by the author is all the due diligence that inevitably precedes these agreements. As many people know, the due diligence process has improved and continues to change, with the longstanding goal being to accelerate the overall deal process and helping to reduce the time it takes to finalize negotiations. That’s why we have seen significant growth in the last 10 years in the use of technology such as online datarooms/virtual dealrooms.