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Cloud Communications Week in Review

By Rory J. Thompson
Web Editor

With the ongoing popularity of the cloud, it makes sense that there would be ongoing updates about this industry. We have the latest from the past week.

In a strategic move that pits it directly against IBM and other public cloud players, Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) has announced they will spend $1 billion on cloud computing products and services built on OpenStack over the next two years. Solutions will be available under the HP Helion brand and HP will be offering its own free version of the open source OpenStack cloud software. IBM (News - Alert) has built its entire cloud strategy around OpenStack as well, making the switch a little over a year ago and rapidly becoming a contender in the IaaS arena. Interestingly, Dell just announced that the company is “reaffirming” its commitment to open standards for building public, private and hybrid clouds. That includes a longstanding partnership with Red Hat producing OpenStack-based private cloud solutions.

Elsewhere, Google (News - Alert) announced it had acquired startup Stackdriver. The company provides services geared toward developers for monitoring apps and services within the cloud. Stackdriver will be integrated into Google’s cloud platform team, and the company’s functionality will be added directly to Google Cloud Platform. The move lets customers access monitoring, providing visibility into errors as well as a high-level view of performance, behavior and operations.

Overall, Cloud adoption is skyrocketing, driving technology trends in business and changing the way pricing, service delivery and adoption have traditionally been handled. To say cloud computing is disruptive is an understatement; it’s pervasive and game changing and is transforming the entire face of technology, from infrastructure through to user-facing applications. ComputerSupport.com has released a new study showing why and how cloud adoption rates have risen so quickly. The information was derived from a Microsoft (News - Alert) study that gauged cloud adoption rates among a number of organizations. The study found that a majority of respondents, including businesses of all sizes, uses both software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) and hosted infrastructure services in some fashion. Interestingly, these services are being utilized most by organizations with less than 100 employees.

Be sure to check back daily for the latest updates from the cloud.