IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search and Internet firms. A relatively limited marketplace of maybe a thousand companies with fat wallets capable of shelling out tens of millions for such system. IBM means to replace the white boxes they use now or build themselves like Google does.

Salesforce.com, which has already linked its CRM software to Google Apps and integrated AdWords tracking into its platform, is deploying a free new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs so third-party developers can interact with data in Google services. The toolkit is supposed to bring together data and content in Google Apps with the database, logic and workflow capabilities in Salesforce.com's Force.com development platform.

NetSuite, the Larry Ellison SaaS company, is buying OpenAir, the 56-man shop that is supposed to be the leader in on-demand professional services automation, for $26 million cash, net of the cash on the acquisition's balance sheet. NetSuite says it probably won't be able recognize most of the deferred revenue on OpenAir's balance sheet so the acquisition will add to its losses this year. It is now projecting non-GAAP losses of $2.5 million-$3.5 million (four-six cents) on revenues of $156 million-$159 million.

Parallels announced that ProServe has selected Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 to deliver a cost-efficient and scalable Online Backup solution via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Parallels Virtuozzo Containers provides the virtualization technology for ProServe's Virtual Online Backup Server (VOBS) offering. By using Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, ProServe is able to deliver an on-line backup solution with the necessary performance, cost-efficiency, scalability and isolation required for their VOBS offered in a SaaS delivery model.

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 software stacks and deploy them on multiple cloud providers with just a few clicks. The joint solution handles partitioning, load-balancing and fail-over, while CohesiveFT makes it easy to bundle these applications with software stacks and deploy them on many cloud infrastructures.

Intermedia announced that it has surpassed 300,000 customer mailboxes hosted. In the past six months, Intermedia experienced growth in the number of accounts with fifty or more mailboxes, demonstrating the growing penetration of SaaS services into the midmarket. Further, over the past year, Intermedia also became a BlackBerry Alliance Member; was honored with the MSExchange.org Reader's Choice award; and launched two major offerings: the hosted Office Communications Server 2007 service and Intermedia Secure Mail email encryption. Intermedia is a Microsoft Gold Partner, a provider of Microsoft Exchange 2007 software as a service (SaaS) and one of the first companies to offer Microsoft Entourage 2008 as a free download to customers. Achieving these milestones signals a landmark year for Intermedia.

In my view, there are some strong technical security arguments in favour of Cloud Computing - assuming we can find ways to manage the risks. With this new paradigm come challenges and opportunities. The challenges are getting plenty of attention - I'm regularly afforded the opportunity to comment on them. However, let's not lose sight of the potential upside.

As a technology provider that helps application companies embrace cloud computing by virtualizing the applications to run on any cloud, I was a bit disappointed with Google's AppEngine announcement. It appears that Google is embracing the 'walled garden' approach of SalesForce.com and Microsoft instead of the cloud approach of Amazon.

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 the cloud. The money should underwrite its anticipated cloud computing cluster platform and expand its business.

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.

The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, which provides most of the systems used within the Department of Defense, has been reaching out to a wide range of companies in the belief that their IT approaches -- including the use of cloud computing technologies -- could help DISA better support the military's warfighting men and women.

SaaS based applications continue to grow at a staggering rate. According to software market analysts, SaaS represented approximately 5% of business software revenue in 2005 and, by 2011, 25% of new business software will be delivered as SaaS and will grow at a 21% % annual growth rate (CAGR) during the next four years. As the acceptance and popularity of SaaS applications has continued to rise dramatically, traditional enterprise integration software has become the Achilles heel of the SaaS industry. Additionally, the wide variety of SaaS vendors specializing in different areas has resulted in companies attempting to stitch together information from a number of different places. Traditional integration software products are inconsistent with the values of SaaS in terms of cost, complexity and time to implement. SOA and XML driven application integrations are very well suited for this purpose. But demand will continue to grow for easy to use, manageable, highly scalable on-demand integration.

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 getting muddier.

Cloud computing is becoming one of the next industry buzz words. It joins the ranks of terms including: grid computing, utility computing, virtualization, clustering, etc. Cloud computing overlaps some of the concepts of distributed, grid and utility computing, however it does have its own meaning if contextually used correctly. The conceptual overlap is partly due to technology changes, usages and implementations over the years.

It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a round-up of some recent attempts to bring welcome precision where there risks being unnecessary vagueness.

The surge in demand for cloud computing and SaaS is partially due to macro-market factors, such as the recessionary economic climate and escalating pressures to fundamentally change traditional business practices. But, growing interest in cloud computing and SaaS is also the result of the success and satisfaction of the early adopters who are not only renewing and expanding their use of these web-based services, but recommending them to others.

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 various Cloud offerings out there.

Safe Software, the makers of FME specializing in spatial ETL, together with WeoGeo, known for its marketplace and cloud computing expertise, announced that they have partnered to bring the powerful data transformation capabilities of FME technology to the cloud.

InstallFree has reached an agreement with Click Manageware to distribute its products in the UK and across Europe on a Software as a Service model. The arrangement expands Click Manageware's portfolio into the developing application and desktop virtualization space, which helps IT directors lower total cost of ownership, improve operational efficiency and increase end-user productivity. InstallFree benefits from Click Manageware's large reseller base and value added services.

GoGrid was first to market with a unique web-based Graphical User Interface (GUI), Windows and Linux cloud servers, free f5 hardware load balancing, and free 24x7 support, among other breakthrough features. GoGrid announces another first: the only Cloud Computing provider that offers all of this plus the availability of a public API, essentially giving users true 'Control in the Cloud.'

Put simply cloud computing is the infrastructural paradigm shift that enables the ascension of SaaS. Cloud computing serves developers and companies who develop software and services. SaaS serves end users who use software.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Damballa, Inc., the only Internet security company focused exclusively on targeted threats such as BotArmies, announced the release of the Failsafe 2.0 appliance. Failsafe utilizes Internet cloud participation to provide immediate identification, protection and feedback on targeted attack activity and similar compromises within an enterprise. Damballa further augments this offering with actionable intelligence for faster remediation and minimized risk to online corporate assets.

Security applications delivered as cloud-based services will more than triple by 2013, according to Gartner. The firm said 20 percent of the revenue of messaging security tools, such as antimalware and antispam services for email and instant messaging, currently comes through the cloud delivery model. But this will jump to 60 percent by 2013.

HP today announced a container-based data center offering that enables customers around the globe to rapidly expand data center capacity in support of IT and business growth.

We all take for granted that our online applications at home will perform the instant we need them. Whether it's Voice over IP, video on-demand, gaming, or other applications, we have instantaneous, high-speed access, anytime. In this environment, IT managers are now facing the question: 'Why can't you deliver the same quality of service at work that I experience at home?'

Now, it's business 101 that the first entrant into a market does necessarily win and that so called 'fast followers' can quickly take over a market. In Cloud computing there are early guys (notably Amazon), the fast followers (notably Google), the weird followers (notably Microsoft and Apple who seem to view the cloud as simple data sync.)...and then there's Yahoo!.

Information Technology is fantastic, absolutely essential, and largely responsible for this country's increase in productivity over the past decade or so. It's also broken. IT is overly complex, difficult to implement correctly, and expensive to maintain over its short lifespan.

Engine Yard, provider of the Ruby and Rails deployment platform, today announced it has closed a Series B financing round of $15 million led by New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), with participation from Amazon.com and current investor Benchmark Capital. Peter Sonsini, Partner at NEA, joins Engine Yard's board of directors.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) firm, Morph Labs, has added capabilities to its end-to-end platform as a service, Morph AppSpace, to allow Java and Grails applications to be deployed, delivered and managed.

Net One Systems, Japan's largest network integrator, and 3Tera, a grid computing technology and cloud computing services, announced today that the two companies have signed a multi-year agreement naming Net One Systems as the exclusive distributor of 3Tera's AppLogic 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.

Boomi has partnered with Innotas to enable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration for Innotas' on-demand project portfolio management (PPM) solutions. The Boomi On Demand offering provides Innotas' PPM users with the ability to integrate the Innotas solution with any other SaaS or on-premise applications. Integrations are built and deployed directly from the Web without the burden of installing and maintaining software packages or hardware appliances. In addition, Innotas is using Boomi On Demand to integrate its own PPM application with salesforce.com.

Boomi announced it has raised $4 million in its first institutional round of financing. The investment will be used to accelerate Boomi's go-to-market strategy and further secure the company's high standing position as a provider of cloud-based data and application integration services.

Catalyst Resources released a 'green audit' of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaborative workspace project that allows distributed business teams of all sizes to work virtually and seamlessly online. The Rich Internet Application (RIA) enabled Catalyst Resources to reduce its carbon impact footprint by 21,000 lbs of CO2 per month, while simultaneously reducing expenses and increasing billable activities by nearly 20%.

Alert Logic announced that it has released version 1.1 of its flagship log management product, Alert Logic Log Manager. The company also announced that Log Manager fully leverages the power of grid computing and virtualization technologies.

Boomi announced that it has teamed with Taleo to lower the cost and increase the software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration options for Taleo Business Edition customers. With the on-demand recruiting solution for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Taleo Business Edition customers have long benefited from best-in-class functionality, an affordable price and ease of use, and this partnership extends these benefits through integration with other systems.

Salesforce.com, which has already linked its CRM software to Google Apps and integrated AdWords tracking into its platform, is deploying a free new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs so third-party developers can interact with data in Google services. The toolkit is supposed to bring together data and content in Google Apps with the database, logic and workflow capabilities in Salesforce.com?s Force.com development platform. Salesforce claims the move creates a -multi-cloud computing platform? that will accelerate the creation of newfangled web-based applications.

Telstra, the old Australian phone company before government-owned monopolies became unfashionable and now the country's leading telecom and media house, is going into the Software as a Service (SaaS) business. It's got a platform called T-Suite and intends to use it to supply on-demand business applications to Australian businesses, particularly SMEs.

eXpresso, a year-old venture-backed California start-up, has taken Excel to the clouds with Microsoft's blessings. PowerPoint, Word and PDF files are set to follow by the end of the summer. eXpresso webifies legal Excel users and lets them share, edit, download and print their spreadsheets over the Internet; the number of people collaborating has virtually no bounds.

Boomi announced that it has partnered with Zuora to enable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) integration for Zuora's on-demand billing application with financial and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Zuora is embedding the Boomi On Demand offering to provide its on-demand Z-Billing users with the ability to integrate with any SaaS or on-premise application directly from the Web without the burden of installing integration software packages or hardware appliances.