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As a major addition to its on-demand suite, IBM has unveiled LotusLive Connections at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, where it won the Cloud Computing Technology Buyers' Choice Award.

LotusLive has long revolved around Web conferencing, with other features being somewhat secondary. The real power for the enterprise came from IBM's Lotus Connections, which is limited to on-premise deployment. But when LotusLive Connections becomes available on June 30th, all that will change.

Today, Salesforce.com has taken their enterprise cloud computing to the next level with Force.com Sites.

The new offering from this "platform as a service" allows anyone to easily build a fully-featured website using the very same cloud infrastructure it has provided for applications. In other words, a comprehensive website can now be created through Force.com, and literally all you need do is design your UI with web standards such as HTML, JavaScript, Flex and CSS.

Earlier this week, large-scale data warehousing and analytics specialist Greenplum announced their move in to cloud services with an Enterprise Data Cloud Initiative.

Picked up by ReadWriteWeb from enterprise IT guru Dana Gardner, the initiative will take Greenplum in to new territory, even if its strategy, based on the notion of "self-service" provisioning, remains the same. Self-service provisioning entails that database administrators can provision new data warehouses and data marts at-will, through a web-based front end in the case of Greenplum.

3Tera, a California-based cloud computing company, today announced the upcoming launch of their AppStore, a marketplace for cloud components where users can find production-ready, scalable components on a free, trial, or pay-per-use basis.

AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools.

Amazon Web Services today announced the public beta of new features for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The new features purport to allow for simple and automatic monitoring, scaling, and traffic control using cloud resources.

"Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers," said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings."

Single sign-on may seem like a service whose time has past. Meant to provide access to multiple resources through one set of credentials, it initially seemed like a godsend for enterprise I.T. At least, until reality set in. Soon people realized that single sign-on was difficult to set up, risky if not paired with other strong authentication mechanisms, and darned near impossible in real life use cases - so much so, in fact, that some people now prefer the term "reduced sign-on" instead. For the end user - the very person the whole system was supposed to help - SSO was never really that convenient either. But that may be about to change, and all thanks to the cloud and a service called myOneLogin.

The spiraling costs of supporting unstructured data such as active file archives, home directories, data migrations, media storage, and data warehouse extensions is a headache for most medium-sized Enterprises. Zetta, a startup out of Sunnyvale, CA is offering to relieve the mid-size customer of the burden of supporting their growing storage needs.

Over the weekend, some Facebook users began to experience issues with their photos. Some photos weren't displaying at all while others only displayed a "question mark" graphic when you tried to view them. As it turns out, the issue was caused by a failure on the drive on which these photos were stored. The outage affected 10 to 15 percent of photos, which, given the site's current status as the top social network worldwide, is a hefty number. However, a recent post on the Facebook blog assured users that their photos were safe, backed up in several locations, and would be restored soon.