Will the IT group of the future emphasize commodity, or play a vital role in business offerings? CIO.com's Bernard Golden says both views are true -- and the CIO of the future has to push one to make room to achieve the other.

Ubuntu and Dell have come up with a scheme to make it easier for Amazon EC2 customers to shift workloads to and from the cloud -- by shipping Dell servers preloaded with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud software, or UEC.

A couple of days ago, Verizon bid to acquire Terremark, for a total equity value of $1.4 billion. My colleague Ted Chamberlin and I are issuing a First Take on the event to Gartner clients; if you’re looking for advice and the official Gartner position, you’ll want to read that. This blog post is just some personal musings on the reasons for the acquisition.

By Lydia Leoung

I’ve now seen a number of press reports and some related writing, about the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastrucure as a Service and Web Hosting, that I feel mischaracterize statements made on the MQ in ways that they were certainly not intended to be taken, and in some cases, mischaracterize the nature of a Magic Quadrant itself. I feel compelled to try to attempt to make some things explicitly clear. Specifically:

Cloud computing will kill capacity planning as CIOs know it and utilization risk will move to cloud providers, says CIO.com's Bernard Golden. Here's his take on what IT and airlines will soon have in common -- plus three strategies for avoiding trouble.

One of the topics that we frequently wrote about in 2010 was how the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing was one of the primary factors driving the acquisition strategy of many vendors.

Now that the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting, 2010 has been published, we’re going to be getting started on the mid-year update almost immediately (in February). The mid-year version will be cloud-only, specifically the self-provisioned “virtual data center” segment of the market. Since I have been deluged with questions about what it takes to be included (and there’s been some interesting fud on Quora), I thought I’d explain in public.

48% of IT workers didn't know the meaning of the term, while 54% of respondents that use apps like Gmail or Salesforce.com didn't recognize them as cloud-based, according to a Virtacore survey of midsize businesses.

Can cloud computing make data center providers more profitable? Financial metrics show that the growing cloud computing operation at Rackspace Hosting is helping the company deliver more revenue from its data centers.

Millions of Skype users have been unable to make voice or video calls over the VoIP service since Wednesday.