cloud computing

As the No. 3 executive at Microsoft, Paul Maritz presided over the company's Windows juggernaut, turned aside threats from Netscape and Sun Microsystems, and pressed the company to embrace the Internet. Now, the longtime software executive is looking down Microsoft's barrel from the other end, trying to help his new employer, VMware, triumph where past Microsoft competitors fell short.

Looking for growth in new markets where it is increasingly being bypassed, Microsoft plans late next year to begin offering a new "cloud" operating system that would manage the relationship between software inside the computer and on the Web, where data and services are becoming increasingly centralized.

The company needs a new kind of operating system for a new computing world populated not by a single style of desktop computer but instead by dozens of different kinds of Internet-connected appliances ranging from smartphones to mini-laptops called netbooks.

In the wake of Microsoft's Windows Azure announcement on Monday, it seems Yahoo will not be left out of the cloud-computing buzz.

Yahoo's Zimbra is tapping into the cloud to deliver a collaboration platform for educational institutions. Through Zimbra Hosted, universities now have access to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite without having to manage on-premises software and hardware.

If Mae West were alive today, the blond bombshell might be asking her dates, "Is that a PC in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" With each new generation of smartphones, that question is getting harder to answer.

Arista Networks on Thursday announced the startup has landed two big executive fish: Jayshree Ullal and Andreas Bechtolsheim. Arista, formerly known as Arastra, a vendor of high-performance 10Gbit Ethernet and cloud networking solutions, is looking to give Cisco Systems a run for its money.

IBM is getting in the cloud. After a string of announcements over the past few weeks from Citrix, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, Big Blue is launching an initiative to extend its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud-computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and independent software vendors (ISVs).

Microsoft is working on a new operating system, "Windows Cloud," aimed at developers working on cloud-computing applications, and expected to launch at the end of the month, according to CEO Steve Ballmer.

Speaking at a software conference in London, Ballmer said the new OS will be rolled out at Microsoft's annual developers conference in Los Angeles, where the official details and name will be announced, according to International Data Group.

Yes, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "Cloud computing is the story of our lifetime. Eventually all devices will be on the network," he told an audience of software developers at a conference of IBM's business partners.

Oracle and Intel on Tuesday announced a joint effort to accelerate enterprise readiness for cloud computing and make it more efficient and secure. The companies also plan to identify and drive standards to breed flexible deployment across private and public clouds.

Amazon is readying a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to compete with the likes of industry veterans Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. It's another step toward cloud computing, and it will be available later this year.

Amazon is no stranger to the cloud. The retailing behemoth launched its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2006. EC2 is a Web service that hosts business software applications. Then Red Hat tapped into the cloud last November with a beta version of its Enterprise Linux operating system on EC2. Now Amazon is expanding the cloud.