#1 LotusLive
Lotus has come out with a full-barrel cloud strategy and it's a good one. Making hardware someone else's problem is compelling for many companies and LotusLive may be far more compelling that Workplace ever was.

#2 Making a living as an IT pro in a cloud-centric world
With a lot of the configuration and server responsibility going back to IBM, how do IT professionals make a living? Those with the ability to cross disciplines, create mash-ups, and deal with heterogeneous environments will win.

#3 Being an ISP in a cloud-centric world
This, too, will change for many IBM business partners. Look more at plug-ins and add-ons to the LotusLive environment, plus some added hassle as you have to wind your way through possible approval and distribution contract challenges.

#4 Eliminating the hardware
With Lotus' announcement that Domino will be available as an image in the Amazon EC2 cloud, even more opportunities open up. Now, it'll be possible to scale without investing in more and more hardware.

#5 The logic of Vulcan
IBM announced Project Vulcan and "opened the kimono" to show us their vision of Notes and the future of enterprise collaboration. Nothing will change in 2010, but as time moves on, the interconnection between services in a loosely-coupled environment could allow for greater flexibility and on-the-fly responsiveness.

So, there you go. A short dispatch. Stay tuned for in-depth analysis over the coming weeks.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.