Christian Gheorghe hates spending money if he can avoid it. As a teenager in Romania in the 1980s he replaced vacuum tubes to keep his television running and subsisted on a used laptop computer with a busted keyboard. Even after immigrating to the U.S. his frugal habits persisted.

In 2005 Gheorghe seethed at the expenses involved in building OutlookSoft, a business performance company where he was chief technology officer. It cost more than $600,000 to get rolling, buying dozens of servers, ­hiring support staffers to run the ­machines and acquiring costly licenses from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. “You linger over every single penny,” Gheorghe recalled. “I kept needing to pay for another license. It never stopped.”

Gheorghe isn’t grumbling anymore. He now runs Tidemark Systems, a maker of business-analytics applications that is a penny-pincher’s delight. His corporate e-mail is free, via Google. Other open-source programs take care of databases and word processing. As for computing power, that’s not his headache anymore. He rents access to a constantly changing array of offsite servers, paying as little as 12 cents an hour for such cloud computing…

The federal government may not be renowned for its operational speed or agility, and certainly IT is no exception, but federal agency CIOs and their employees have gradually been warming to the new model of cloud computing, according to a panel of industry executives speaking at a conference here on Wednesday.

"We’ve seen movement both in private cloud and public cloud," says Susie Adams, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s federal business.

Adams and others noted that government clients are increasingly looking to commercial cloud services both for infrastructure functions like computing power and storage, and applications such as email and collaboration or CRM-like tools to deliver better citizen services…

Cloud computing adoption is gradually picking up steam, yet legitimate concerns about security, data portability, auditing, compliance, and other issues have kept some IT departments on the sidelines. Security solution vendor StillSecure hopes to tackle some cloud security concerns with their new Cloud Network Security Appliance (NSA).

"Security in a cloud environment can be both a black box and a minefield of risk at the same time. Most people aren’t prepared to cope with the kind of exposure and weaknesses that used to be hidden behind a firewall," said Carl Brooks, an infrastructure and cloud computing analyst at The 451 Group that was quoted in the StillSecure NAS launch announcement. "Fear of the unknown and having to rely on the ‘just trust us’ model are a bad combination. That’s why security remains one of the key factors preventing cloud adoption."…

Onit, a leading provider of business productivity and process management apps, today announced that Paul Zengilowski, Customer Development Executive, and John Gilman, Director of Products, will present at the Managing Litigation Forum 2012. The duo will focus on the benefits of cloud computing and how law departments can leverage the increasingly app-centric approach to technology deployments in a session scheduled for May 3.

Based in New York City, Managing Litigation 2012 will host hundreds of corporate counsel interested in litigation readiness and how to put project management principles into practice…

Mobile operators are able to capitalize on demand for cloud services by bundling those services with their mobile data plans, according to a new report from Pyramid Research ( www.pyr.com ).

How Mobile Operators in Europe Monetize Consumer Cloud Computing Services analyzes the pricing models for cloud services launched by mobile operators in Europe. It begins by reviewing the existing pricing models and highlighting their limitations for telecom operators. Then Pyramid Research provides examples of how data plans evolve in order to address three key objectives of operators: increasing spending from existing users, retaining customers and attracting new users. Finally, Pyramid’s outlook on emerging models that will enable operators to make the most of their investments in deploying cloud-based services for the consumer market is presented. The report includes case studies of three operators: Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), Orange Romania and Vodafone Portugal…

While some are happy to debate definitions of cloud computing, I prefer to focus on the characteristics that make successful companies, successful. Lately there seems to have been a shift from the anything for anyone cloud to the industry or vertically focused cloud. Adding to this is today’s piece of news from Zynga who announced what they describe as "the beta release of Zynga.com,  a new service enabling third party developers to create and publish games on the Zynga Platform." Yes, that company that brought you farmville is now going to be a cloud service provider enabling a whole new crop of game companies, which I can only assume they will acquire when the time is right.

So why is this news important? It’s another great example of a trend in the cloud computing sector of "Vertically focused" cloud products and services. In the early days, there was this mentality of just build it and they would come. Problem was that for most, they never really came. Instead you had a handful of very large players and everyone else fighting over the table scraps. What those who survived learned, is that in order to be successful it isn’t about being the best funded or even the best performing, but instead it is about being the most focused on the needs of a particular customer vertical. Those who focus on a particular problem, be it for a particular enterprise sector, application or customer need will have a clear and distinct differentiation in a market dominated by me-too cloud services…

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine have been selected for CISDI INFO’s cloud computing platform, a cost effective information system, which allows enterprises to demonstrate and manage their design results on the design service platform.

Oracle will enable CISDI INFO to offer complete solutions for customers, and achieve its strategic objective to become the "International Engineered Technology Company and the Engineered Technology Service Provider- the first choice of steel companies"…

DocuSign today announced its DocuSign Cloud Partner Program to bring together leaders in cloud computing who are standardizing on DocuSign for eSignature to make it easier, faster, and more secure for companies of all sizes to manage online transactions and signatures in the cloud.

“Electronic signature has gone from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ as companies look for innovative ways to increase speed to results, reduce costs, and delight customers,” said Keith Krach, chairman and CEO of DocuSign. “We continue to see more industries, businesses, and individual professionals embrace DocuSign to sign everything, everywhere in the cloud – driven in part by partners integrating with DocuSign for their eSignature platform.”…

‘Cloud Computing’ are the words on everyone’s lips – it’s the latest technology, the way forward and has many benefits – but how safe is it? Is it reliable? How secure will your information be? Just what are the risks associated with Cloud Computing?

‘Cloud Computing: Assessing the Risks’, the latest book from ITGP answers these questions and many more, using jargon-free language and relevant examples, analogies and diagrams. Up-to-date, clear and comprehensive it truly is a guide to the security, governance, risk, and compliance elements of Cloud Computing. Find out more here: www.itgovernance.co.uk/products/3820…

VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced the release of VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.1. This new release extends product integration to include the application delivery controller (ADC) infrastructure and CloudStack, the open source cloud computing platform. The addition of ADC support in the product automates the control and real-time resource allocation decisions for multi-tiered applications front-ended by acceleration and load balancing appliances.

Adding to the product’s existing support for VMware vCloud Director, the new support for CloudStack provides enterprises and cloud service providers with choice and delivers service assurance and improved utilization for the rapidly growing cloud infrastructure build-out…