Outblaze founder and CEO Yat Siu lays out several convincing arguments on his personal blog to explain how Google is likely to benefit should it withdraw from China.

Google shocked the world when it announced that it was going to exit China as a result of government censorship and sophisticated hacking attacks that targeted Chinese dissidents using the Gmail service. Here’s an excerpt:

Google’s exit is not necessarily a face saving move or  a public stab at Baidu, but a tactic calculated to gain market share in more lucrative western markets, which represent the vast majority of Google’s currently reported financials (Q1-3 USD 16.974 billion with Q4 results also expected to be strong). Google is getting excellent publicity globally about this issue  (outside of China, that is). Even more interestingly, Google has recently become proactive on similar sensitive topics and I would not be surprised if this situation ends up creating a significant rise in activity and demand for Google products and services.

Enjoy this logical, evidence-based argument and don’t forget to click on the hyperlinks, because Yat’s post links to a truly impressive amount of information. Read on at Yat Siu’s blog.

In the latest news from IBM, Panasonic will move 100,000 to 380,000 employees to IBM’s LotusLive hosted, Web-based collaboration suite of services. This deal is noteworthy in the cloud arena for its size: it is larger than any enterprise deal inked so far by Google Apps, a highly popular platform boasting 2 million clients.

Few companies can ever hope to match IBM’s reputation and track record among enterprises. Now Big Blue is proving to be quite the cloud warrior, boldly striding into the Software as a Service fray after having accelerated its product offering with the purchase of Outblaze technology last year (Outblaze messaging assets were incorporated in the LotusLive Web-based collaboration suite).

Congratulations to IBM and Lotus from Outblaze!