HP began its OpenStack-based Cloud Services this month, and there is a lot of promise but not much in the way of actual implementation yet. HP intends its cloud to cover both public and hybrid uses. Initially, the beta is free of charge although you will need to provide a credit card number for authentication (you won't be charged anything while the beta is underway).

While Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has always had its cheerleaders - yours truly included - the harsh reality is that, commercially speaking, PaaS offerings have underperformed relative to expectations for several years running. This is particularly the case among enterprises, which have, by and large, turned a blind eye to the technology.

Government computing resources, like any other government procurement, used to be purchased by agencies for those agencies... and nobody else. It didn't make sense to share, because the very concept of sharing compute power didn't even exist. Now in an almost unprecedented shift of philosophy, the U.S. Government is one of the world's leading adopters of private cloud infrastructure. In order to slash costs fast, it's moving to the cloud sooner than almost anyone else.

Now, some government agencies, departments, bureaus, and divisions that no longer have any reason to avoid maintaining their compute resources separately from one another, also have no viable reason for staying separate from one another. IDC analyst Shawn P. McCarthy has discovered, and discusses in a newly published report, local governments are rapidly slashing costs by purchasing compute power and capacity on a metered basis from state governments.

Prospective cloud customers - both consumers and enterprises - throughout Europe are wary of the possibility, however remote, that the contents of their cloud deployments may become open to inspection by government authorities. Not European governments, mind you, but American, by virtue of the Patriot Act. Passed into law before legislators ever pondered the prospects of virtual servers in the cloud, the U.S. law grants federal investigators authority, under court order, to ask service providers for information from and about their customers, for use in anti-terrorist surveillance.

Leading U.K.-based telecom analyst firm Informa has been measuring the extent to which European carriers have been withholding their investments in cloud technology, in U.S. dollars. This morning, Informa released its findings, which indicate an almost crippling setback for the continent as it struggles to stay competitive with North America and Asia/Pacific.

Cory Doctorow's "keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress" and follow-up post (Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing) on BoingBoing raise the alarm about keeping the Internet and PC "free and open." Doctorow makes excellent points and if you haven't watched the keynote or read his essay, you should do so right away.

I'm generally in agreement with Doctorow, but I'm not really sure that he goes quite far enough with Lockdown. Doctorow's focus on the copyright war we're facing with things like SOPA and PROTECT-IP is well warranted, but I'm not sure it covers everything.

A devastating assessment of the course of technology growth last Friday from technology analyst Forrester flies in the face of what competitive firms would consider "conventional wisdom," to say that before cloud computing truly commands the attention of enterprise network architects, a few other dramas currently in progress must play themselves out first.

At the center of one of these dramas is a player that officially exited the enterprise computing market in November 2010: Apple. The reason: Apple makes a tablet that CxOs really want. Many may not actually know how it integrates with their networks, but unlike most any technology purchase to date, they're willing to invest in it now and figure out the solutions down the road.

If you are looking to virtualize some of your data center and host it in the cloud, you probably have heard about Amazon's EC2 by now. But one IT shop used EC2 as a strawman to consider what they really needed from their eventual service provider. It is interesting and instructive to see the steps that WoundVision took for this process. The company produces a risk assessment software solution supported by infrared thermal imaging for early wound detection.

I got all excited this morning when I saw a link on Hacker News to BitPocket, one of the latest so-called “DIY Dropbox” offerings that’s open source. The excitement faded pretty quickly when I hit the GitHub repo and found that it’s just a “small but smart script that does 2-way directory synchronization” without most of the Dropbox features.

Dropbox didn’t get where it is today by being a wrapper for rsync, Git, Unison or any of the other open source tools for file synchronization. If you want to replicate Dropbox’s suceess, there’s a few features that are mandatory.

Out with the old, in with the new. One of the “old” ways of thinking that finally kicked the bucket in 2011? That users could get a free ride on Web services with no catch. As Robert Heinlein famously said, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL). This realization isn’t new for some, but the realization should finally be kicking in for mainstream users as well.

The combination of Google’s housecleaning spree, relentless Facebook redesigns and privacy gaffes, and popular services being bought, being ruined or just going dark, users should be getting the hint: The free ride is over and the bill is due.

It has been a busy year for VMware in terms of acquisitions. This followed an almost equally busy 2010, during which it bought both SpringSouce, incorporating its technology into vFabric, and Zimbra from Yahoo, which it has kept separate.

Most of the 2011 buys we have covered in various posts here, but a few escaped our attention. I thought it would be a nice year-end post to review where things stand with each technology. By comparison, Google this past year acquired more than two dozen companies.