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.

Those of you with about two decades in your career have witnessed and no doubt benefited from quantum changes in the speed of business information. From FedEx™ and fax machines to dial-up Internet and email to ubiquitous IM and handheld device video chat, information flows with increasing velocity in such a way that speed has become a competitive imperative for many firms. Similarly, from my corporate development days I remember my first transactions and making multiple flights across the Atlantic to physically sit in a data room to take notes from a bookcase of binders and boxes of files. The use of a Virtual Data Room (VDR) to support a deal was transformative – not just from the personal benefit of not traveling for diligence, but more importantly from the speed in which information can be reviewed, distributed to team members and analyzed in parallel fashion. The information now travels to the best possible resource regardless of location.

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.

At the end of last year I went on a long voyage, in fact to the other side of the world, to work at IntraLinks’ Sydney Office. I left my two children who are both under five and my partner for two weeks. Naturally I was concerned for their welfare and knew I would miss them but what surprised me was that I was also very worried that I had yet to create, let alone update my last will and testament. What financial mess would I leave behind if my plane crashed? What was certain was that the tax man would be inordinately happy about my lack of financial housekeeping and my family would be left devastated. The main question that this made me ask myself though was not why have I been so remiss, but why is it that we have to be scheduled on a flight to make us focus on what should have been done an age ago.

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.