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The OpenStack Project is moving a bit closer to its proprietary competition with the Diablo release, out today. In addition to improving the three core projects, OpenStack is now adding a Web-based dashboard, unified authentication and an API for configuring virtual networks. With Diablo, OpenStack is poised to manage global clouds.

The OpenStack Project has made impressive gains since its inception just a little more than a year ago. OpenStack has gone from a joint project between RackSpace and NASA to a massive effort spanning 110 companies and organizations.

Cisco announced today that collaboration tools vendor Versly.com is now part of its ever-growing family. Versly hasn't yet had a real product, but you can apply for a chance to be in its closed beta on their site.

Versly's ten employees will be integrated into Cisco Collaboration Software Group that also includes its WebEx, Jabber and Quad product lines. It will be offered as a separate service, but Cisco will eventually integrate its features into these three existing services designed for enterprise customers, perhaps as early as 2012. So comment streams, detecting whether someone is actually inside a document at any given moment, and jointly editing documents will all be parts of Cisco's collaboration tools eventually.

More trouble for Cisco: Ars Technica is writing a damning piece, written by Ian Mulgrew, on how Cisco may have abused the legal system to unjustly punish a former employee engaged in an antitrust suit against the company.

According to Ars Technica, Cisco filed spurious hacking charges against former Cisco executive Peter Adekeye to prevent him from giving a deposition.

Yesterday Cisco announced that it will lay off 6,500 employees and sell a manufacturing plant in Juarez, Mexico to Foxconn to shave off an additional 5,000 employees. This follows Cisco's decision to discontinue its Flip camera products and its Eos video/social platform.

It wasn't long ago that Cisco was expanding into new markets and burning through billions of dollars acquiring companies like WebEx, Tandberg and Flip. So what happened?

The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, is a trend that we've been actively tracking since early 2009. So far a lot of big technology infrastructure and solutions companies have gotten behind the trend, for the simple reason that they see a huge market opportunity. As more and more 'things' go on the Net, it creates more demand for network infrastructure like sensors and routers. Enter the likes of Cisco and Verizon Wireless. Likewise, more technology solutions will be developed to upload and manage data from real world objects. Enter the likes of IBM and HP.

Cisco has designed an infographic that offers a simple example of how Internet of Things will affect you in your everyday life. It also states that by 2020, there will be 50 billion 'things' connected to the Internet - everything from your body, car, alarm clock and even cows.

China trying to buy some Facebook. News has surfaced that a sovereign wealth fund representing the Chinese government wants to buy a substantial amount of Facebook stock. According to anonymous sources who spoke to Business Insider, China wants to own enough of Facebook "to matter."

Is China's interest in Facebook a simply a government-sponsored group of venture capitalists looking to get a piece of the upcoming Facebook IPO or is there something more complicated at work behind the scenes?

Oracle recently published details of the Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, a set of recommendations and best practices for building Oracle certified private cloud infrastructure stacks. It includes optimized configurations for applications and virtual machine templates.

The stacks consist of Sun Blade servers, Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux, Oracle VM Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, Oracle/Sun ZFS storage solutions and Sun networking technology.

Enterprise software tools vendor Solarwinds has announced new versions of several of its products to help enterprise virtualization and network admins better manage their networks. All are available now.

Judy Estrin is a serial entrepreneur, having started seven tech companies since 1981. She was the former CTO of Cisco Systems from 1998-2000, and is on the boards of Disney and Packet Design and was a board member at Sun and FedEx for many years. She wrote Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy back in 2008. She now runs her own firm, JLabs, speaking and advising businesses on innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship.

This white paper shows how EMC IT migrated its Oracle 11i CRM E-Business Suite database servers from a Sun E25K/Solaris infrastructure to Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. In addition it highlights the methodology developed by IT while migrating the database from RISC/SPARC to the target UCS (Intel and Linux) platform.