Like a growing number of enterprise IT executives, Craig Baughn, vice president of hosting operations at Concur Technologies, a corporate travel and expense management company in Redmond, Wash., is carefully studying how to transition from a virtual environment to a private cloud.

Like a growing number of enterprise IT executives, Craig Baughn, vice president of hosting operations at Concur Technologies, a corporate travel and expense management company in Redmond, Wash., is carefully studying how to transition from a virtual environment to a private cloud.

Riverbed has products on tap that will enable WAN optimization as a cloud service, speed up the boot time for remote virtual desktops and, perhaps in a year or two, a software client that will speed up the performance of handhelds and smartphones.

There's a new kid in town when it comes to open source code in the cloud. It's Rackspace's OpenStack, based on both Rackspace's and NASA Nebula's existing cloud engines. Wasn't there already sufficient open source code in play? Why do we need this initiative on top of those already afoot? Actually, we need 3-4 such initiatives.

Senior tech execs from Cisco, Infoblox, Microsoft, VMware, ServiceMesh and (former) Sun share their perspectives on cloud computing and network requirements at May 2010's Future in Review at Terranea.  

By Alex Williams

Google's announcement to offer cloud-based storage is in many respects an exciting development but it also illuminates the lock-in issue and why many an enterprise is reticent about adopting cloud computing.

We heard one of the clearest discussions on the issue today at the Webvisions conference in Portland by two senior engineers from Yahoo! and Facebook. [..]

CA expands partnership with Cisco and makes further moves into cloud computing and virtualization management.

IT executives at the school say Google's commitment to privacy and security doesn't meet their standards.

Intel Capital and several other investors have placed $40 million into Virtustream, a data center co-location and services company that recently launched a cloud computing service.

In an important industry contribution, The Open Group has published a white paper on how to build and measure cloud computing return on investment (ROI).