Saas

The real truth about cloud computing is that it can make IT vastly more powerful and efficient, but making it work means changing everything IT does every day and much of the infrastructure and processes it has spent 30 years building. No wonder it hasn't worked yet.

At the VMworld conference, VMware CEO Paul Maritz described efforts to lead virtualization in half a dozen markets at once, only one of which it unquestionably owns now.

Should you take wing to the cloud? The answer depends on whether you're sending email, creating a slideshow, or editing an photograph.

Amazon's EC2, poster child for enterprise class cloud computing, had major problems overnight, bringing down a series of web sites and other customers, marring its own reputation.

Amazon beat rivals Google and Apple to the punch Tuesday when it launched its Cloud Drive digital music storage service, but the rivals are probably happy to let Amazon take the lead, an expert said today.

This week I found out that my company is developing software in-house. Until now I hadn't known that we were a software development shop, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Most companies that I've been with have developed their own software for one purpose or another. I only learned about this software development project when one of the programmers approached me to ask about the best way to store usernames and passwords in the application's database. Yes, that's right -- they built the authentication right inside the application, instead of calling out to an external authentication source.

Microsoft virtualizes apps running on Windows Server ahead of rival VMware.

Remember Google Wave, the innovative although sadly unloved e-mail and chat hybrid that was retired last year? Well, it sounds like Google couldn't stand to turn it out into the cold, and several of its features have made their way into Google Docs.

Concerns about latency and questions about security and regulatory issues aren't stopping CIOs from moving key systems to the cloud, even if it means using apps hosted in data centers on the other side of the globe.

In the hotel business, IT people are used to having to create standardized technology services to share with parts of the company that they don't necessarily own.

One of the risks of deploying Internet-scale infrastructure and applications is that, until they are put to the test, you can't have 100% confidence that they will scale as expected. Applications and infrastructure that perform well - and correctly - at nominal scale may begin to act wonky as load increases.