In conjunction with Microsoft Corp’s announcement of its new Virtual Machine Image Gallery for Windows Azure, BitNami has announced that it is making two of its popular open source application bundles available free of charge for Windows Azure. The BitNami application bundles, called stacks, allow developers to get their favorite web applications and development environments up and running on Windows Azure in minutes.

“We are excited to be working with BitNami to support their open source web applications and development frameworks on Windows Azure,” says Helene Love Snell, director of Marketing, Microsoft Server and Tools Business. “BitNami’s solution allows developers to get their favorite web applications up and running quickly and easily.”

PrivateCore, an early-stage private computing company, today announced that it has raised $2.25 million in seed funding from Foundation Capital. Building software solutions that address the privacy concerns surrounding public cloud computing infrastructure, PrivateCore will use the new funds to expand its core development team with top virtualization and security engineering talent.

"Our vision for PrivateCore is based on a different cloud computing model – one where cloud infrastructure can be leveraged without the need to delegate control over physical safeguards to service providers," said Oded Horovitz, CEO at PrivateCore. "Our technology solves the Infrastructure-as-a-Service privacy problem and will ultimately lead to the ‘Death of the Server Cage’. It is a very exciting time for us as we begin building out our development team with the best virtualization and security experts interested in this kind of challenging engineering opportunity."

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the next step in its delivery of open hybrid cloud solutions to enterprises with the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms. CloudForms is an open hybrid cloud management platform built to enable enterprises to create and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hybrid clouds with the ability to make self-service computing resources available to users in a managed, governed and secure way.

“The role of enterprise IT is evolving. There’s no doubt that end users want to help themselves to cloud-like compute resources, but the IT department still needs to centralize deployment, management and integration,” said Rachel Chalmers, vice president, Research, Infrastructure Management at 451 Research, a division of leading global analyst and data company The 451 Group.  “A platform like CloudForms makes it possible for organizations to build clouds that span their in-place infrastructure and expose it to a new generation of developers and end users, all without relinquishing control.”

Green Cloud Technologies, a Cloud-based technology solutions provider headquartered in Greenville, SC, has concluded a $2,750,000 round of financing that is a mix of Series B Preferred Units and three-year Convertible Notes. The bulk of the financing comes from Millry Corporation, a 70-year-old Incumbent Local Telephone Carrier serving southwestern Alabama. The additional financing will be used for market expansion and the build-out of the company’s second data center facility in Nashville, TN. Green Cloud previously secured $1,250,000 through the sale of Series A units in 2011.

"This is another vote of confidence for Green Cloud’s strategy from a very savvy and experienced investor group," said Shaler P. Houser, CEO of Green Cloud. "This financing further enables Green Cloud to help businesses transition to our secure, reliable, and robust Cloud-based infrastructure and increase the efficiency and performance of their businesses."

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Alastair Stevenson.

The acquisitions of Autonomy and Vertica will help deliver new product innovations that will be central to HP’s road to recovery, according to chief executive Meg Whitman, speaking during her Discover 2012 keynote.

Whitman highlighted new developments in big data management, security and cloud as key growth areas that will allow HP to reverse its ailing financial fortunes.

"The tectonic plates of the technology industry are moving," said Whitman. "Today the forces of cloud, social, mobile and big data are changing the model […] information is exploding."…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Steve Woods.

This morning cloud computing giant Google announced, quietly, on its company blog that it had made yet another new acquisition. The roar of this latest purchase, however, will be heard for a long time to come, especially in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington headquarters.

"We’re happy to announce that we have acquired Quickoffice, a leader in office productivity solutions," begins the post by Google’s Engineering Director, Alan Warren. If you’re an Android or iOS tablet user, you may’ve heard of Quickoffice’s suite of cloud-supported office productivity tools, designed to allow users to remotely create, edit, store and share PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents. According to Quickoffice, their product is on 300 million mobile devices worldwide…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Kicking off its third annual Cloud Summit, the North America Services Division of Ingram Micro Inc. IM -0.23% today launched 56 new products and services as part of its expanding portfolio of cloud and cloud-enabling technology solutions. The new announcements bring the number of Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace offerings to more than 100 solutions from 40 different technology vendors throughout North America.

Additionally, Renee Bergeron, vice president of Managed Services and Cloud Computing for Ingram Micro North America, provided the more than 400-plus partners attending the 2012 Cloud Summit with an update on the distributor’s strategic direction and expanding leadership role as a master aggregator of technology services and cloud computing. She also addressed the state of the market, noting once again the explosive opportunity and service revenue potential cloud brings to the IT channel…

Grazed from PC Week. Author: Will Greenwald.

Samsung is bringing video games to its HDTVs with cloud computing. The company is partnering with Gaikai to add the Samsung Cloud Gaming service to the company’s current 7000 and up series HDTVs.

Gaikai’s cloud gaming technology performs all the graphical processing in servers away from the HDTV or computer where a gamer is playing, streaming only the input, graphics, and sound back and forth between the player and the server. OnLive has seen some success with this technology, which can be accessed through computer and mobile clients or through the OnLive MicroConsole. Gaikai has made many console game demos available for play over Web browsers, and will make several full games available over Samsung Smart HDTVs, including Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed and FIFA games…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Hewlett-Packard kicked off its annual HP Discover user conference, being held in Las Vegas this week, with a number of new cloud computing offerings, emphasizing a single architecture that can be used across both in-house and public clouds.

"Regardless of whether we’re helping people build a cloud, or if a customer consumes cloud services from us, [what HP offers] is built on one architecture," said Steve Dietch, HP enterprise vice president for worldwide cloud operations…