The term, “vendor lock-in” strikes terror throughout the IT community. And yet in reality, many companies are pursuing strategies destined to increase their dependence on a limited number of vendors mostly driven by the ineffectiveness of IT to provide simple connectivity capabilities between various corporate applications. By shrinking the number of vendors, IT is actually creating vendor lock-in. [...]

Earlier this week, we covered a post from VMware that seemed to brush off all three of the emerging open source cloud computing platforms that are gaining such strong momentum, namely OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus.

Last year, Citrix Systems announced that it had completed the acquisition of Cloud.com. Cloud.com had many notable customers who favored its cloud stack infrastructure, including GoDaddy and Zynga. That acquisition has helped fuel Citrix’s recent big move forward with CloudStack, its contribution of the Cloudstack platform as open source to Apache, and its choice to [...]

With the OpenStack spring conference taking place in San Francisco this week, there is already a wave of OpenStack-related news arriving. The open source cloud computing platform, of course, is shaping up for fierce competition with Citrix’s CloudStack and other platforms. Now, Rackspace, one of the organizations that helped OpenStack get started, has announced that [...]

Immediately following Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy, the company has acquired Podio, which delivers cloud-based, user-configurable collaboration and workspace environments.

The OpenStack cloud platform hasn’t been short of powerful companies backing it, and now 19 of them have pledged support, including substantial amounts of money, for OpenStack Foundation, which is to be a nonprofit organization functioning as steward of the open source OpenStack framework.

The new version of the cloud toolkit also adds support for multiple storage backends, makes the web front end more navigable and add VNC support to the self service portal

Hewlett-Packard announced a series of open-source-based cloud offerings and added network automation capabilities to its hardware products in an attempt to carve out its piece of a market currently topped by Amazon Web Services.

It’s always interesting to see who really contributes to open source projects. That’s doubly true when it comes to projects that are corporate-driven, because they provide a lot of insight into which companies are driving a project and have a stake in supporting it. Looking at the numbers for OpenStack’s Essex release, it’s clear that [...]

The cloud computing cognoscenti seem to remain convinced that Citrix’s CloudStack and OpenStack are gearing up for a battle that will leave one and only one winner. Meanwhile, there seems to be little discussion going on at all surrounding other cloud computing platforms, such as Eucalyptus. There are some good reasons to believe that–just as [...]