Piston Cloud Computing — which bills itself as the OpenStack enterprise company — is the latest cloud vendor to offer a free or low-cost version of its software for customer trials and proofs of concepts.

And it begs the question: Why are cloud providers going cheap?

"We’ve spent a lot of time talking to analysts, customers, and most folks are in the ‘we want to try before we buy phase,’" says Piston CEO Joshua McKenty, who is also one of the co-founders of the OpenStack movement…

Migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud is fundamentally different from migrating less critical applications and processes to the cloud. Picking the right cloud hosting provider is among the most important decisions you’ll make when planning the migration of your Tier 1 applications. After all, cloud providers that typically focus on developer services can quickly find themselves out of their depth when dealing with production applications.

"The requirements and capabilities that an organization needs when running a production application are very different than one that’s catering to developers," says Craig McLellan, cloud architecture author and chief technology officer of Hosting.com.

Tier 1 applications often stand to benefit the most from the efficiency and scalability offered by a cloud environment:

1. Consolidation and infrastructure efficiency
2. Faster provisioning of applications and better configuration management
3. Universal high-availability services
4. Automated resource optimization, and dynamic scaling of applications…

Dell Cloud Dedicated, a private IaaS service, is the latest addition to the PC giant’s cloud services strategy. Also this week, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) introduced online ordering for public and hybird cloud services, and the company also expanded its VMware-oriented vCloud Datacenter Services to more countries.

That’s a lengthy list of moves. But can Dell PartnerDirect companies — VARs and MSPs — cash in on the initiatives?

Let’s take a look at each move. Dell indicated:

Interoperability, and the challenge of maintaining control of operations in the face of it, is a central issue for those that operate distributed applications on the internet — or “in the cloud.”

In this case, however, I’m not talking simply about creating and controlling interoperability from the developer level. Tools and services like Dell’s Boomi or IBM’s CastIron have existed for years, and have some success in delivering more flexibility to integration between applications and services. However, these services are focused on solving the developer’s key issues with integration –how to make sure messages move between components based on a process definition and one or more translations, if needed…

OnLive’s collapse means that many talented people are currently without a job. However, many of them may find a new home: Microsoft. The company is hosting an OnLive "networking mixer" at its Mountain View campus, not far from OnLive’s Palo Alto HQ.

Although Perlman and OnLive are attempting to get as many people back with the newly restructured company, there will still be many unable to (or unwilling) to return to the game streaming company. Microsoft’s pursuit of former OnLive employees is particularly interesting, especially when considers Sony’s recent acquisition of Gaikai, a competitor in the game streaming space…

For the past few years, cloud computing has been heralded as the next biggest trend in enterprise IT with benefits set to meet every business requirement.

Market analysts from leading agencies such as Gartner and IDC have in their independent opinion estimated an exponential growth of the cloud market with predictions estimating it to reach a value of $72.9bn by 2015. Already organizations across the Middle East are approaching cloud solutions vendors with the hope of deploying a model which will dramatically cut operational costs which still acting as a vehicle to drive business.

And while such discussions are well underway, there still is a fair level of confusion regarding the actual path to the cloud…

As virtualization and cloud computing have risen to prominence, so has the need to reduce the costs and complexities of virtual machine management. Vendors are starting to address the issue with user portals that offer services like virtual desktops and ERP and CRM applications, which may require several back-end processes to be set up.

Embotics has joined the fray with this week’s release of the latest version of Embotics V-Commander, which delivers IT as a Service using both private and public clouds. The approach allows managers to choose new services from a catalog, automate billing and chargeback for what’s selected, and provision the virtual and physical assets required…