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 built around the 2W MPC5121e mobileGT PowerPC chip that Freescale usually sells to Detroit for navigation devices.

With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial analysts gathering in Redmond Thursday. Ballmer highlighted software-plus-service, associating it with a 'platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home' (Microsoft's Mesh widgetry) and promised 'more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies' at the company?s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) at the end of October.

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 servers.

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 in a month (not a year, a month). Users couldn't access their stored data - a particularly scary situation for a cloud-dependent business.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Q-layer announced the Q-layer Delegation Manager, a solution that turns virtual server environments into a true cloud computing platform. This release of Delegation Manager provides complete support for VMware Infrastructure 3 environments, including the VMware ESX Hypervisor, with future support for additional Hypervisors including Xen, Sun Microsystems' xVM VirtualBox and Microsoft Hyper-V. The Q-layer Delegation Manager enables fast browser-based provisioning of data center assets for helpdesk, technical end-users and non- technical end-users, with integrated credit-based charge-back capabilities, reporting and easy to use flash-based management controls. Q-layer's Delegation Manager is installed in minutes through the VMware Virtual Center as a Virtual Appliance and builds on Q-layer's VPDC and Datacenter Abstraction Layer (DAL) technology. It enables model-driven orchestration capabilities for data centers, including workflows to cohesively orchestrate virtual servers, networks and storage.

CohesiveFT and Skytap announced a technology partnership to distribute CohesiveFT's Elastic Servers to Skytap's Virtual Lab platform. The combined solution will provide application development and test teams the capability to dynamically assemble and deploy custom application stacks to a virtual test cloud, freeing them from time-consuming build and set-up tasks and the constraints of traditional test lab environments.

Novell says it's going to 'simplify' pricing and discounts on SLES for mainframes for the rest of the year. That means it's going to cut prices by 33%-47% by offering a three-year subscription for the price of a two-year subscription or a five-year subscription for the price of a three-year subscription. The discounts apply to workload consolidation from non-System z platforms and renewals of existing SLES subscriptions.

Q-layer announced that it has expanded its operation into the United States. Founded in 2005 in Belgium, the company has experienced great success in the European market with the Virtual Private Data Center software targeted at Service Providers. With the opening of the new office in Mountain View, CA, Q-layer also announced the worldwide appointment of Matthew Powell to president and chief executive officer. As President and CEO, Powell will provide strategic direction and management as Q-layer continues to establish itself as a high standing enabler of cloud computing.

RightScale announced RightScale Manager for MySQL Enterprise, an offering designed to make it easier for organizations to deploy MySQL databases in the Amazon Web Services cloud. Starting July 1, RightScale customers will receive the benefits of RightScale's automation and scale-on-demand cloud management platform, coupled with MySQL Enterprise premium-level support for large database applications.

Univa UD announced the publication of a white paper and supporting tools that documents the process of implementing its open source UniCluster product in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) web service. Univa UD sponsored BioTeam, a life sciences informatics consultancy and systems integrator, to document the process and publish the tools. The paper titled How to: UniCluster and Amazon EC2, presents step by step instructions for setting up UniCluster within EC2.

Yesterday we read the news of B-hive's acquisition by VMware. Also this week Microsoft closed the Kidaro acquisition, which had been announced earlier in the year. Both of these companies participated in SYS-CON's second international Virtualization Conference & Expo last November in San Francisco. This event was also the last conference BEA Systems sponsored, days before their Oracle acquisition news hit the press. PlateSpin is one of the Gold Sponsors of the upcoming 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City. Novell bought the company before this event has even taken place. In the past six months, four out of nine Virtualization Conference sponsors were acquired.

Well, if the economy - and not just software, mind you - is going from products to services and perforce subscriptions then vendors are going to need an appropriate billing system that chases down and captures all the monthly payments, right? Well, that's what a couple of lads out of the on-demand school thought too and that's why they started Zuora Inc on Marc Benioff and Benchmark Capital's combined nickel.

DreamFactory, a pioneer in cloud-based Web applications and development tools, announced the company will offer its entire DreamFactory Suite on the new Intuit QuickBase Development Platform. DreamFactory's project management and collaboration cloudware will soon be readily available to millions of businesses using Intuit software.

Valtira announced the availability of The Valtira Online Marketing Platform on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Valtira customers now have access to the most cost-effective, scalable, flexible infrastructure to power their web marketing solutions.

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 them a competitive advantage down the road.

I always come back to this distinction between cloud and grid computing when people talk about 'in-house clouds.' It's easy to say 'ah, we'll just run some cloud management software on a bunch of machines,' but it's a completely different matter to uphold the premise of real-time resource availability. If you fail to provide resources when they are needed, the whole paradigm falls apart and users will start hoarding servers, allocating for peak usage instead of current usage, and so forth.

Recently I've been asked about the benefits of cloud computing in comparison to that of virtualization. Generally my answer has been they are an ideal match. For the most part virtualization has been about doing more with less (consolidation). VMware in particular positioned their products and pricing in a way that encourages you to use the least amount of servers possible. The interesting thing about cloud computing is it's about doing more with more. Or if you're Intel, doing more with Moore.

CDNetworks and Nirvanix announced a strategic partnership to deliver a unified cloud storage and content delivery service. Available immediately, CDNetworks' customers will be able to store unlimited amounts of protected and secure content online and move content instantly to and from any of CDNetworks' 63 nodes worldwide at previously unseen economies. The partnership with CDNetworks will provide Nirvanix customers with the ability to not only securely store massive amounts of media and content but also stage content for instant delivery anywhere in the world, utilizing one of CDNetworks' data centers for local delivery. By combining these services, companies will have better overall media delivery capability and also save 80 to 90 percent over building or growing storage infrastructures of their own.

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 general consensus seems to be, if you are a SaaS, PaaS, or a IaaS you are probably a cloud and this makes the list even longer.

Web hosting company, Rackspace Managed Hosting's Mosso cloud division, has developed a new control panel including a new provisioning system for its flagship product, The Hosting Cloud.

Microsoft added this week workflow capabilities to BizTalk Services, the company's platform-in-the-cloud project for SOA and business process management.

Virtualization allows new business models like Amazon Web Services, where the virtualization is leveraged to provide hardware for rent. That model combined with scale allows for a dynamic resource allocation that is very attractive for start-ups that do not have an IT workload that is either constant or predictable.

Cloud Computing is the new buzz word in the technology industry. But even industry insiders don't agree on exactly what the term means. Mike Eaton, Founder and CEO of Cloudworks and Atticus Information Systems, will be giving a breakout session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

I was chatting with a customer the other day who was struggling with some of the implications of cloud computing. The analogy that finally made sense to them is what I will call 'cloud dining.' I am the cook in the house and I am tasked with feeding the family. If my 10-year old is lobbying for Italian, I can cook at home or order out. The decision may also vary from day to day. For instance, I might not have all the ingredients and have to order out, or, like this weekend, it may be 103 outside and cooking at home is not all that appealing. Now, the same can be said for supporting a given application in a cloud computing environment.

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 recent outages from Amazon and Google Apps, the question of the cloud's competence, security and reliability have come into play. In this session, Hyperic's CEO, Javier Soltero will address these issues along with the many others surrounding the cloud including: The emergence of web operations as a discipline, How cloud computing simply changes, instead of eliminating the importance of web operations, What tools are available to help better manage cloud environments?

Mike Eaton, the founder and CEO of Cloudworks, provides five tips for companies watching their bottom line in a tight economy to enhance the remote access for mobile professionals through cloud computing.

10gen announced $1.5 million in Series A financing from Union Square Ventures. The cloud computing company, founded earlier this year by DoubleClick veterans Kevin Ryan, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, and former Joost engineering VP, Geir Magnusson Jr., aims to provide significant time and cost saving advantages by allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and delivering functionality rather than expending effort on infrastructure, scaling and system management.

Net One Systems and 3Tera announced that the two companies have signed a multi-year agreement naming Net One Systems as the exclusive distributor of 3Tera's AppLogic, the commercial grid OS for cloud computing, in Japan. Starting immediately, Net One Systems will offer cloud computing infrastructure and services using 3Tera's AppLogic. First customer deployments will be announced later this month.

Sonoa Systems announced that Sterling Infosystems has selected its ServiceNet solution to more effectively operate Sterling's SOA infrastructure and ensure enterprise-class security, manageability and performance of these customer-facing Web services.

Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities. Dr Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, Inc., will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - an adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

The future model for providing IT infrastructure and services in large organizations is what many today are calling 'Cloud Computing' - a concept popularized by Amazon through its web services efforts. Merrill Lynch analysts for example reckon that by 2011 the volume of Cloud Computing market opportunity will amount to $160BN, including $95N in business and productivity apps (e-mail, office, CRM, etc.) and $65BN in online advertising.

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 was widely observed, the company's third or fourth attempt in the last 18 months or so - one loses count after a while - to rearrange the deck chairs and supposedly prove it can stay afloat with Microsoft out of the picture.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Cloud Computing, in its current incarnation, falls short on its promise to make computing as a whole as simple as plugging an application into a utility service. Kirill Sheynkman, Founder & CEO of Elastra Corporation, will be giving a session on Elastic Computing vs. Cloud Computing at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - a brand new adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

The demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current 'in house' storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Patrick Harr, CEO of Nirvanix, will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 20-21, 2008) - a brand new adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

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.

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, Open Web Developer's Journal, and iPhone Developer's Journal.

VMware is moving to create a free version of the VMware ESXi hypervisor. The company's new CEO also plans to delve deeper into cloud computing and expand VMware's virtualization technology reach.

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.