IBM’s going to peel off another $300 million and sink the money into building 13 clouds scattered in 10 countries around the world where business and government can tuck their data and applications against disaster and destruction.

The term 'Cloud Computing' is much too vague. People want and need 'slots' or 'segments' where they can group things. This is how the mind operates through categorization and ordering. So, to possibly help with this, I would like to propose a 'Cloud Pyramid' to help differentiate the v...

If Dell is going to pursue its quixotic quest to trademark the expression “Cloud Computing,” it’s going to have to convince the US Patent and Trademark Office that the buzzword is neither merely descriptive (like, say, spotted pony) or generic and so “incapable of functioning as a sour...

There seems to be a lot of debate as to what Grid computing really is. In fact, the blogosphere seems to be throwing around terms like Grid, Cloud, Utility, Distributed and Cluster computing almost interchangeably. And rather than clarifying things, I feel that the waters are just gett...

The world's first journal devoted to the delivery of massively scalable IT resources as a service has been launched by SYS-CON Media, the latest in a series of leading-edge additions to its 25-plus stable of online and print publications such as Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal, Ope...

In an internal e-mail leaked to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe, Apple’s panned flirtation with the cloud, was launched prematurely and was “not up to Apple’s standards.” Remember? Even the Apple-loving Walt Mossberg over at the Wall Street Journal branded it ...

Dell, it appears, put in its papers with the US Patent and Trademark Office in March of last year to trademark the buzzword “Cloud Computing.” Its application quietly passed through the Opposition Stage a few months ago unopposed and thus it is now at the point that it’s been allowed b...

There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback ...

Microsoft Corp. expects a 'substantial portion' of revenue from its core business services division to come from online applications in the next few years, the new head of that division, Stephen Elop, said Wednesday.

Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov figures Google could dominate the cloud – the question is how much – with Microsoft at least a close second and maybe Apple can wrestle the rest of the wannabes like IBM, HP, Facebook, Adobe and EMC for third place. Then comes the internal clouds, where ...

An emerging SaaS player called Good Data Corporation, with interests in collaboration business intelligence solutions, has gotten $2 million in seed money from analysts and sometimes investors Esther Dyson and Tim O’Reilly, Good Data founder and CEO Roman Stanek, who did NetBeans Inc a...

One of Microsoft’s confidants says that the Red Dog project that broke cover in a want ad a few months ago is indeed the Kiplingesque pet name for Microsoft’s impending cloud infrastructure – well, at least part of it anyway. It was described in the ad as virtualized and fully automate...

One of the problems with clouds is that they have this tendency to rain as it did on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) on Sunday when it was down - and not for the first time - in both the US and Europe for something like eight hours - translating into less than 2Nines availability ...

Application server management software developer NGASI has introduced a hosted version of its AppServer Manager on Amazon EC2. The 'no installation required' service gives Amazon EC2 users the option of not installing their own version of NGASI AppServer Manager to manage application s...

As the cloud-o-sphere tries to define this 'cloud' thing, myself included, it seems like the list of who is a cloud just keeps getting longer and longer. I originally thought the Forrester 11 list was a little to long when it included SalesForce.com and Akamai as cloud providers. The g...

HP announced that it will be supplying the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) with scalable technology to enable its Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to deploy a cloud computing infrastructure.

Regardless of the downturn in the markets, Morgan Stanley is on track to spend more than ever on their IT budget. They seem to think that during periods of lower economic activity it gives them a rare opportunity to establish themselves in new areas of emerging technology that may give...

Just as people begin to understand the difference between web ops and IT, we are entering a period where clouds promise 'Ops-Free' computing. Because it's easy, scalable, available and disposable, the cloud is well on its way to becoming 'technology's next big thing.' However, with rec...

With the stock market crashing, or giving a good approximation of a crash Thursday, Yahoo, poor thing - well, it has behaved like a sick lost puppy, now hasn't it - announced a supposedly pressure-relieving reorganization just like its familiars in the press said it would. It is, as wa...

Every time I log into Facebook, or search for flights online, I am taking advantage of cloud computing. However, neither of these examples would be considered SaaS. According to Gartner, cloud computing is not just a buzzword; it does have a distinct meaning separate from SaaS.

GigaSpaces Technologies and CohesiveFT announced their partnership to enable simplicity in building scalable applications in cloud environments. GigaSpaces' recently announced cloud application server, combined with CohesiveFT's Elastic Server On-Demand, allows customers to build softw...

Amazon has kicked into Engine Yard's $15 million Series B round along with Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The two-year-old 70-man open source company provides a deployment infrastructure, services and support for developers to take their Ruby and Rails applications to...

About a month and a half ago HP created a Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Organization (SCIO) out of a stealth Web 2.0 group that it's had under the covers for the last year, year-and-a-half and its HPC unit along with its cloud intentions.

When picturing the relationship between the enterprise and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, imagine an evolutionary process that can be divided into three main stages: 'The Comfort Zone,' 'The Enlightenment,' and 'The Re-Assessment.' Once we examine these, we can then d...

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys li...

The advent of SOA and standard-base Web services together with Internet based delivery models has provided the essential base for facilitating new software platform innovations. One of these innovations is a breakthrough software componentization technique that we have coined Service O...