We have seen a lot of movement towards cloud based computing in the past few month. More specific to our industry, customers are outsourcing their email and directories to (using an old term) ASP's (Application Solution Providers). What's more interesting is these companies are not moving over EVERYTHING to the cloud. For various reasons they are partially migrating to outsourced positions. There are very good reasons for this:
To this end we have committed resources to fully support as many cloud based email systems as possible. In the up and coming release of SimpleSync, we will have full support for Google Apps. SimpleSync will be able to pull all email addresses from an apps account and sync them anywhere. In addition Google Apps account provisioning support will also available.
Microsoft is also promising the same kind of cloud solution for email and directory with their Live and Azure announcements. However there does not seem to be much information about it other than the fact that it's basically setup as a Resource Forest. Something SimpleSync already supports in it's production code.