It’s not everyday that $100-plus billion companies split themselves in two. Late last month, eBay decided to spin off its fast-growing payments division, PayPal; last week, Hewlett-Packard moved to separate its PC and printer divisions off from its enterprise hardware and service groups. And most recently, Symantec announced it would split into security and data storage. On the other end, we just witnessed the largest acquisition in the history of cloud computing — where one of the largest software companies in the world, SAP, is buying Concur, a provider of on-demand travel and expense management software-as-a-service, for $8.3 billion.

Beyond the question of what these tech companies are worth, it’s important to ask what’s going on here? The developments can only be described as an “inversion” caused by a new shift in cloud computing. And I say inversion because the pattern we see today is almost the reverse of developments evident in the past… MORE