Did IBM expect to kick off a storm with what appeared to be an innocuous document called the Open Cloud Manifesto? All the company intended, according to the IBM spokesman who circulated the manifesto, was to “initiate a conversation that will bring together the emerging cloud community (both cloud users and cloud suppliers) around a core set of principles.”

Microsoft, which has its own cloud initiative in the works, immediately went ballistic. Google appeared to sign on initially but reportedly has backed out. Cisco, another initial signer of the manifesto, may pull out, too. Amazon.com, probably the biggest cloud player to date, never signed on board in the first place.

Increasingly, financial applications and the IT infrastructure to support finance will be coming from the cloud. NeoSystems, for example, is putting Lumigent’s AppGRC product in the cloud and delivering it as a SaaS offering. more

We use “outsourcing” to mean so many things that there is no way it can really be true or practical for all of them. This one term is used in reference to such widely disparate activities as accessing lower-cost labor in Asia and having a Fortune 100 company run your data centers for you. Is it any wonder then that the success rate of outsourcing entire IT functions is vanishingly small? more

Sam Silvers of Deloitte Consulting recently visited with us on West 17th Street here in NYC. We knew he’d have an insightful take on how the downturn is impacting finance, so we couldn’t resist inviting him into our video white box. Remember, the white box tour of duty may look easy, but it’s not. How would you answer these questions?

IFRS fact of the week: 83 percent of 200-plus corporate finance executives expect to make significant improvements within the finance function as a result of the conversion to IFRS.

That datapoint comes from a new survey conducted by Accenture.

The other results, also eye-opening, cover the conversion’s impact (it will reverberate well beyond finance and accounting) and its cost. more

Amidst the discussion over changes to FASB 157 and the application of mark-to-market accounting for assets that have dropped in value, another change by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has been largely overlooked.

Yesterday, the FASB issued FSP FAS 141(R)-1, also known as “Accounting for Assets Acquired and Liabilities Assumed in a Business Combination that Arise from Contingencies.” The intent of FAS 141(R)-1 was to clarify several questions raised by an earlier statement, 141(R), about properly accounting for assets and liabilities that trade hands during a merger or acquisition. more