Opscode, a young Seattle company that sells cloud-computing management services, has added some executive firepower to help manage its growth—co-founder Jesse Robbins is handing over chief executive duties to Mitch Hill, founding CEO of tech-services company Avanade.

Robbins, an Amazon.com veteran, is staying on board as chief community officer to guide work on Chef, Opscode’s open-source IT management software. And no, Robbins says, this isn’t one of those entrepreneur nightmares where the investors and board members jam a new executive down the founders’ throats…

When VMware announced last week that it would loosen the radical change in price structure it announced only a month ago, it was doing more than mollifying a few disgruntled customers. It was responding to a revolt among customers, analysts say, even at large companies that rarely considered competing virtualization platforms due to VMware’s lead in the technology.

VMware was also responding to increasing pressure from a whole new class of competitors who see the cloud not as a higher level of abstraction on the data center (as VMware has traditionally approached it), but as the primary platform on which end-user companies can run the applications they actually want…

BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) today announced additional capabilities integrated into its BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution that proactively ensures the service quality of cloud services and avoids many of the risks of cloud computing such as outages, performance and capacity issues, while simplifying cloud administration…
 

Service provider Logicworks has chosen the ScienceLogic^™ Inc. EM7^™ IT operations and cloud management platform to provide its enterprise managed hosting customer base with advanced monitoring options. New York-based Logicworks provides enterprise managed hosting and managed cloud solutions for mission-critical applications and content for clients including Dow Jones, Starwood Hotels, Radar Online, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts…

Firstly, there was just the Cloud; now we have to deal with the hybrid Cloud. So what on earth is it?…

A commission of 71 top cloud computing experts has released IT and policy recommendations to help governments adopt cloud computing. IDN looks at core recommendations from the “Cloud First Buyer’s Guide for Government” with commission member Sanjay Poonen, president of SAP’s global solutions unit…

Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing infrastructure experienced a brief network outage this evening that knocked offline popular sites such as Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare.

The network connectivity issues struck Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at Amazon’s northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast at 7:39 p.m. PDT and were resolved about 25 minutes later, according to the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard…