On Wednesday, as expected, Microsoft rolled out a new Azure service that lets you spin up raw virtual machines that run both Windows and Linux. Plus, Azure now lets you use virtual networks that span Azure and your own data center — something Amazon has long offered as well, reports Wired Enterprise’s Cade Metz.

Microsoft is also offering a new software development kit, or SDK, for the service. And according to Lucas Carlson, the CEO of AppFog, a Portland, Oregon, startup that is running software atop the new Azure, the key addition is a new API, or application programming interface, that lets developers more easily use Azure from a command line or in tandem with widely used developer platforms such as Ruby on Rails and Node.js.

Microsoft was not able to discuss the new Azure, which was unveiled with a blog post. But according to Carlson, the API will use the web’s underlying HTTP protocol and an API convention called REST (representational state transfer). Basically, this means it can be used on most any software platform, with almost any language.

Read the full story at Wired Enterprise.

Should Amazon be worried? Have your say, below.

While the tech world waits for Oracle chief Larry Ellison to tweet — for the first time — about his company’s new cloud initiatives, more attention has been paid to the tweet than the cloud news. Read the rest of this entry →

In a move sure to be seen as the next chapter in the cloud office wars, the battlefield has moved to mobile with Google buying mobile Microsoft Office-compatible app maker Quickoffice.

Announced quietly on the Google Blog on Tuesday, Google’s engineering director, Alan Warren, played the cloud card be emphasizing how Quickoffice would bolster Google Apps:

Today, consumers, businesses and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyone and on any device. Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we’ll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite.

The post announcing the news was short — but sweet, leaving little doubt about how important mobile will be to Google’s cloud office suite. (Note the use of “integrated.”):

Quickoffice has a strong base of users, and we look forward to supporting them while we work on an even more seamless, intuitive and integrated experience.

This move will be seen as Google doubling down on momentum it has with its Google Apps cloud office suite. It is actively pushing universities, government and agencies, and businesses to make the switch from Microsoft Office. Microsoft still leads, by far, and is moving its apps the cloud. But it does not yet have Android or Apple iOS apps for its cloud suite.

A recent Gartner report said: “Google Apps is taking more business away from Microsoft than we expected, raising its stature as an enterprise provider. Microsoft’s dominance on-premises prevails but, ultimately, it may face a serious threat to its Office franchise.”

How important is mobile going to be in the next chapter of the office suite wars? Does this move give Google a leg up on Microsoft?

The “Cloud Big 5″ (as I call them) — Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Dell — are engaging in an all-out war to determine cloud supremacy. With a projected market to hit $241 billion by 2020, it’s no wonder. I recently wrote about IBM’s massive push into the cloud IBM to the World: On Cloud Computing, You’ve Got Nothing on Us, and each of the Big 5 are likewise making huge cloud announcements.

I recently spoke with Christian Verstraete, HP’s chief technologist/cloud strategy, and he explained to me HP’s four areas of focus, and that despite layoffs and trouble in other segments in the company, the cloud is moving forward in big ways and is at the top of the company’s priorities.

To support this statement, cloud announcements are emerging from the HP Discover event in Las Vegas this week. On Tuesday, HP announced that by using its Operations Orchestration Manager software, its private and hybrid cloud offerings can be configured to burst into public clouds, including the HP Public Cloud, Savvis, and Amazon Web Services. Read the rest of this entry →

With body-worn video cameras only being used by little more than 6 percent of police nationwide, VIEVU is looking to make the technology more affordable and practical by storing video evidence in the cloud. Read the rest of this entry →

Mobilize.net on Monday launched its computer-aided software migration business with products aimed at porting legacy business apps to new web-, mobile-, and cloud-based platforms, the company, headed by two former Microsoft execs, said.

Owned by ArtinSoft, Mobilize.Net is licensing its parent company’s software migration tech, including Kablok and Matchine source code migration engines, which shipped with Microsoft’s Visual Studio on the .NET platform, it said in a press release.

The takeaway: The company will use the migration technology to bring legacy .NET applications to Microsoft’s Azure — or any cloud — as well as a variety of mobile platforms. “We have an offering now for Azure via Artinsoft, but if customers want to put their .NET applications on Amazon Web Services, heck yeah, we’ll do that,” spokeswoman Dee Dee Walsh told GigaOm. Read the rest of this entry →

Just weeks after Oracle bought the social marketing firm Vitrue, Salesforce.com said Monday it was buying Buddy Media — for a cool $689 million.

Michael Lazerow, co-founder and CEO of Buddy Media, said of the deal in a press statement: “Buddy Media’s mission is to eliminate the current state of anarchy in social marketing. With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers will be able to unify their efforts to better organize their teams, optimize their social programs and deliver real business results.” (See also in video below: Lazerow’s unique take on the deal.)

Oracle touted its integration approach with its Vitrue buy last month, saying: “The proliferation of social media and an increased demand by consumers to engage with brands across multiple social channels is driving chief marketing officers to look for an integrated social marketing platform,” Oracle’s Thomas Kurian said in a press release at the time. “Vitrue’s leading social marketing and engagement platform coupled with Oracle’s leading sales, service, and commerce products offers a complete social experience solution to our customers.”

Other than, as Benioff notes, social marketing being a “multi-billion dollar opportunity,” there is a war between the two billionaires behind Oracle and Salesforce.com, Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff, respectively, which heated up last year at Oracle’s OpenWorld:

Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Sorry #oow11!Join me @ St. Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM!The show must go on!Sorry Larry!

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) October 5, 2011

So is this all about chasing the chief marketing office (CMO) market with its Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or more about billionaire tech titans and a brewing battle? (Disclosure: I saw Marvel’s The Avengers last night, so excuse the world-at-war mindset.)

On a different note, Buddy Media’s Lazerow shares his “no fear” approach to life, which gives new meaning to heart-warming:

I have been speaking recently with cloud executives from HP, Dell, and other cloud providers. I have been asking what they see as the hurdles to cloud expansion. These are the hurdles that each of them feels they must leap to achieve the market share they want. Read the rest of this entry →

With news of the latest souped-up Google Chromebooks, as well as a capitulation by Google that its cloud/web-centric Chrome OS needs to act more like a traditional OS and ditch the browser-only model, it’s time to ask if we could be looking at the first post PC-era machines. Read the rest of this entry →

As I mentioned in my inaugural column for Cloudline, I work for Microsoft, where I’m building a community calendar system on the Azure cloud platform. Like other calendar systems, mine (obviously) runs in the cloud. But unlike other systems, mine isn’t a database that users dump information into. Rather, it’s a hub that coordinates flows of data from users’ own cloud-based services.

I want everyone who is the authoritative source for some stream of data to actually be the authoritative source. If you are sponsoring a church supper on Saturday, I want you to record the details of that event once, in your church’s own cloud-based calendar service, in a way that enables the information to appear on your site and also syndicate into other contexts: the local newspaper’s website, a hyperlocal blog, the chamber of commerce site. The syndication hub that my service provides (for any city or town) enables these kinds of sites to gather, merge, and display calendar events from the church, the schools, downtown merchants, the hospital, sports leagues, the jazz club, the library, and other sources.

Read the rest of this entry →