International Business Machines Corporation

IBM is going deeper into the cloud. On Tuesday, the Armonk, N.Y.-based company announced beta versions of an expanded commercial cloud-based service for software development and testing, on both public and private clouds.

Cloud computing for development and testing environments, the company said, can cut IT costs in half while improving quality, reducing time to market, and utilizing infrastructure more efficiently.

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Google is making it easier for IT administrators to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The Internet search giant on Wednesday made available a tool to help businesses migrate from Exchange.

The Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool will help lure more companies to Google Apps by simplifying the migration of e-mail, contacts and calendars from both cloud-hosted Exchange servers and those hosted at the customer's location. The tool allows businesses to make the move whether they have a handful or thousands of users.

Social networking site Facebook is opening an operations office in India, its first in Asia, to help manage rapid growth in the number of users.

The office, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, will have advertising and developer support teams, the company said Monday. It will supplement Facebook's other centers in Palo Alto, California; Dublin, Ireland; and Austin, Texas.

The move is part of a push to create support centers across time zones, with round-the-clock, multilingual support, the company said.

A former executive with IBM and other tech companies has been named the new CEO of an organization in charge of coordinating the technical specifications behind the World Wide Web.

The Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, is remaining the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Jeffrey Jaffe, 55, will work under him as its CEO. Jaffe replaces Steve Bratt, 53, who left the position in mid-2009 to run a Web foundation also started by Berners-Lee.

When you recycle a plastic bottle, it doesn't necessarily become another plastic bottle.

Because of limitations in recycling technology, a common type of plastic used in water bottles and food containers weakens so much when it's recycled that it can't be used again for the same purpose. Some small amount of the plastic might make it into another bottle, but more often than not, it instead becomes synthetic carpet or clothing and can't easily be recycled a second time. So when those products are used up, they end up in landfills.

Energy savings of 99% over previous methods probably sound like snake oil. But some math geeks have been able to find a way so that computers can use only 1% of the energy (and the time) necessary for some tasks.

Bill Warren founded an early online job board in the 1990s, helped kick-start an industry and was president of Monster.com, one of the leading Internet career sites. But these days he's not very happy with the results.

So he's taking another crack at it, going after Monster, Career Builder and similar commercial job sites. Warren is starting a nonprofit job listing system that could lower the costs that employers pay to list positions and make the process easier and more fruitful for applicants.

Everyone loves clouds these days in corporate computing, and the concept will be a big part of the buzz at the CeBIT information-technology trade fair in Germany March 2-6.

Tasks that we used to do with a desktop computer are often being shifted into the "cloud," meaning that some nameless computer, often on another continent, is helping do the job or save the data.

"It's not just big companies like Microsoft and IBM that are going in for this. Quite small companies will be showing cloud products at CeBIT," said trade fair spokesman, Hartwig von Sass.

Iron Mountain on Monday announced its acquisition of enterprise-class content-archiving solutions company Mimosa Systems for about $112 million in cash. Mimosa brings more than 1,000 enterprise customers to the Iron Mountain fold.

Iron Mountain's latest acquisition gives the company an integrated archive for e-mail, SharePoint data and files, and an on-premises archiving option to complement its existing cloud-based archives. With the Mimosa acquisition, Iron Mountain is positioning the company as a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management.

Cisco Systems on Thursday moved to end its long-term relationship with Hewlett-Packard. With the two companies increasingly competing in servers and networking, Cisco decided to formally cut HP from its reseller program, effective April 30.

Cisco's decision means HP will no longer have access to proprietary information from its newly found rival. Although HP can still sell Cisco products to its client base, the computing giant won't be able to tap into incentives.