In a move to bolster its cloud service prowess, HP acquired open source cloud software startup Eucalyptus Systems last week. Essentially, HP hired Eucalyptus’ entire workforce (which is less than 100 people), along with their CEO Marten Mickos as the Senior VP and head of HP’s cloud computing wing. Mickos

India’s second-largest IT services provider, Infosys, have been busy recently. As well as extending their decade-long partnership with Microsoft and offering next-generation infrastructure to enterprises in collaboration with Hitachi, they’ve announced an entirely new partnership. They’ve partnered with Huawei to Huawei’s cloud computing infrastructure and Infosys’ IT expertise to their

In a major announcement this week, IBM has released Watson Analytics, a service that will give businesses — both large and small — access to natural language tools and predictive algorithms on a freemium pricing model. It will be a cloud-based service designed to run on desktop and mobile devices. Calling it

It was revealed yesterday that networking giant Cisco is in talks to acquire Private OpenStack cloud service innovator, Metacloud. With an aim boost its strategy towards building the world’s largest global Intercloud – a network of clouds – Cisco has been mobilizing significant technology partners, service and cloud providers, integrating

BlueData, a stealth mode startup that deals in private clouds, has launched a free 5-node license of EPIC Enterprise which may be the industry’s first Big Data software that enables enterprises to create a self-service cloud experience on-premises. “Enterprises need a platform to easily experiment with existing and emerging Big

In a report recently published by IDC, it was suggested that cloud technologies are significantly disrupting infrastructure sales in EMEA, with estimates that $3.4 billion was spent on hardware going to cloud environments during 2013 (marking a 21% increase compared to 2012). “Along with big data, social, and mobility, cloud

Oracle Social Cloud on Tuesday announced LinkedIn support for its Social Relationship Management (SRM) platform, allowing Oracle Social customers the ability to publish, engage, automate, and analyze LinkedIn activities within the Oracle SRM platform. Oracle will now join LinkedIn’s Certified Company Page Partners Program, which offers tools and services to

Japanese IT vendor Fujitsu announced on Monday that it is injecting $2 billion over the next two years to expand its cloud portfolio. The company said that the majority of its budget will be spent on new datacenter capacity and ramping up investment in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS),

While cloud technology can offer several benefits to businesses, it is not without its downsides and risks. One of the major issue is the cost involved in migrating workloads to the cloud. Of course, the cost factor is usually discussed in detail with prospective vendors before finally making a decision.

Max Kanaskar is an Associate for Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company). He has extensive experience in IT capability development and data management, and has advised companies in transformational data management programs, including data strategy, management and governance. He’s a regular commentator on big data and technology. His views can be found