Microsoft has released a new version of Windows Intune — its fledgling online service for managing PCs — continuing its push into the brave new world of “cloud computing”.

“Our vision for Windows Intune is big,” Eric Main of Microsoft said in a blog post on Monday. “We want to take the best of the capabilities delivered through our on-premises solutions…and enable them through the cloud.”…

In an unusually tame appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit, Salesforce.com (NASDAQ:SFDC) CEO Marc Benioff declined to lash out at rival Oracle and its mercurial CEO Larry Ellison and even praised the company for its success…

HP today announced new services and solutions based on HP Converged Infrastructure that empower service providers and enterprises to rapidly deliver cloud services while leveraging existing investments, minimizing risk and lowering costs…

People underestimate how much cloud providers present a challenge to IT as it’s practiced today in most organizations. A couple of news stories brought home this point. They illustrate the existential threat that cloud computing and its practices present to corporate IT groups.

The first item that came across my desk was a blog entry about AOL and how it has built a completely unmanned data center. The writer noted that he came to AOL relatively recently and was tasked with streamlining its data centers. He says, "It was during this process that I came to realize that our particular legacy challenge, while at ‘Internet’ scale, was more closely related to the challenges of most corporate or government environments than the biggest Internet players."…

Cloud computing represents a compelling new way of providing business agility, flexibility and time-to-value. But companies are learning the hard way that deploying cloud-based applications without considering the unique characteristics of the cloud is resulting in user frustration, low adoption rates, reduced revenue and ultimately failure to achieve the predicted ROI…

Contegix, a managed cloud hosting and Internet infrastructure company, today announced a strategic expansion to its Contegix Cloud Computing platform. MiraCloud(TM), the company’s new cloud computing platform, will offer customers a tiered cloud hosting model that includes convenience class, business class and enterprise class levels. With the introduction of MiraCloud, Contegix is redefining how the cloud is delivered and can be managed, giving customers the option to customize their cloud platforms to provide ultimate freedom of choice, without sacrificing uptime or quality of service…

Netflix may be getting a lot of bad press in recent times due to its management’s ill-advised decision to raise subscription rates by almost 50% resulting in widespread customer dissatisfaction and a groveling apology by CEO Reed Hastings, but it was not long ago that it was considered the epitome of home entertainment.Netflix is another new-age company that owes its success to cloud computing, the same way that Zynga, the creators of Facebook game sensation Farmville, does (See: Zynga, the Latest Cloud Computing Success). And not surprisingly, for both of them, the cloud provider of choice is Amazon, perhaps the earliest player in the game…