Scott Gode -- vice president of product management and marketing; Azaleos

The hype surrounding the public cloud has reached a fever pitch in the past year. Amazon is making big news with EC2. Meanwhile, in the unified communications (UC) arena, Microsoft’s recent introduction of the Office365 service is really making IT departments sit up and take notice. This combined email, IM/Presence, conferencing, collaboration and voice behemoth — largely because it is delivered as a public cloud service — was billed as a panacea for the ills of the communications and collaboration world.