Former US government CIO Vivek Kundra says the global economy is "wasting billions of dollars on unnecessary information technology"-- and the cloud is an opportunity to cut such costs while increasing productivity.

Writing on the New York Times, Kundra accuses the "IT cartel" of powerful private contractors for worsening the situation by encouraging "reliance on inefficient software and hardware that is expensive to acquire and to maintain."

Until leaving the Obama administration this summer, Kundra planned a "Cloud First" strategy, advocating cloud Read more...

Canalys reports WW private cloud infrastructure and services revenues for channel partners will total $36 billion in 2011-- from a cloud computing opportunity worth $40Bn in total. 

Meanwhile the analyst estimates WW public cloud business revenues will total $85Bn, as consumers drive public cloud expansion for companies including Google, Microsoft, Baidu, Facebook, Yahoo! and YouTube. 

Canalys conclusion might be somewhat obvious by now-- "Private cloud initiatives provide the obvious choice for channel partners looking to grow new business," as Read more...

VMware announces its collaboration with "key industry partners"-- Canonical, Dell, enStratus and OpsCode-- in order to expand its vision of becoming something akin to cloud computing's Microsoft.

Ubuntu guardian Canonical will include Cloud Foundry's client and server components in its Ubuntu build (11.10), with client and server deployable tools using Ensemble-- allowing users to deploy applications in AWS, Openstack or their own internal servers. 

Dell will release a version of its Crowbar software framework allowing Cloud Foundry installation Read more...

The French government unveils a French cloud computing consortium together with Orange, Dassault Systemes and Thales, the AFP reports. 

Codenamed Andromède, the project dates from 2009, with French government stimulus funds worth €4.25Bn-- and will involve the building of big data centers providing secure hosting for French government bodies and corporations. 

The consortium still needs to nail down its financing and governance, mind-- and each institution's unions' signed blessings. 

The cloud effort is definitely a take on the likes of Amazon and Read more...