ReadWriteWeb

HP held a big press event in San Francisco yesterday but not to show off a tablet, a phone, or a printer.  The company wanted to show the world its vision of the future.  HP is betting that in the future, the "cloud" isn't a destination, it's a medium, wires and jacks are outdated and the next step is seamless integration of all our devices.

The big story yesterday was that this vision has HP positioning itself as a direct competitor to Google's Chrome OS.

Okta was founded in 2008 by two former Salesforce.com executives to solve an emerging problem for organizations using cloud services: user management and access control. Okta integrates with Active Directory, Google Apps and other user management and access control systems to provide single sign-on and access control services for software-as-a-services (SaaS). According to co-founder and President Frederic Kerrest, Okta supports hundreds of services and that number is growing weekly.

A post on News Y Combinator has an intriguing proposition to the sometimes daunting task that startups face when launching a service.

The post asks if startups would be interested in a service that offered an API and other services to launch a startup.

Developer Regan Wolfrom wrote the post. In a reply to comments in the post, he said he and his partners are developing a service that would offer an API, and potentially an embedded JavaScript, to analyze the data from a launch and provide updates, alerts and reporting. The service would track users, while allowing for customized alerts and feature controls.

A cold snap in Texas may cause problems for the cloud. Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the operator of about 75% of the state's power grid, is ordering rolling blackouts to reduce power demand. This could cause disruptions for data centers based within ERCOT's region. According to The Associated Press this includes cities such as Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, and Abilene.

Several notable hosting companies, including Rackspace and Host Gator, are based in Texas. We haven't seen reports of outages from these or any other hosts, but WordPress warned users of its WordPress.com service that service may be interrupted.

Update: ERCOT has ended the rolling blackouts for today.

Last year, Google began allowing users to upload docs of any file format up to 250 MB in size to Google Docs, turning the service from simply an online word processor into a cloud storage service. Today, the company has unveiled a number of user interface changes for Google Docs that continues the move toward becoming the mythical "Gdrive" - a cloud-based file storage service.

Earlier this month we covered Gartner analyst David J. Cappuccio's concerns that a data center crisis is looming. This week we're seeing increased data center hiring. We talked to SunGard Availability Services's Managing Principal of Consulting Services Dr. Mickey Zandi, who says that although data center hiring isn't in crisis yet, it's already difficult to find qualified people. He shares some advice for data center managers and workers on how to prepare to for the future.

It is inevitable for any considerable enterprise to consider how the cloud and the data center can be combined in the most dynamic, efficient and secure way as possible.

It's a decision making process that gets even more complex when considering the dizzying terminology that makes sense only after considerable conversation.

I kept thinking about these customers when listening to Hewlett-Packard (HP) discuss its new hybrid cloud service.

Today Heroku, a Ruby platform-as-a-service which was recently acquired by Salesforce.com, disclosed a serious security issue. The vulnerability has been fixed, and there is no evidence that it was ever exploited.

Earlier this week, NodeFu had its databases deleted when admins revealed its CouchOne password on Github. Missteps by PaaS providers leave customers at risk and jeopardize the reputation of the public cloud.

Is it time for a PaaS security certification standard?

In the ongoing battle between Google and Microsoft for the cloud-based education market, it's Microsoft's turn today to tout itself as "the premier cloud suite for education worldwide," announcing that Live@edu is now used by more than 15 million students worldwide. In October, Google announced that its Apps for Education had crossed the 10 million user mark.

Microsoft also announced a number of new institutions that have chosen to move to its cloud services, including Beijing Open University, Western Kentucky University, and University of Bologna.

Will Dilbert do more cartoons about the cloud this year?

Now these are the questions that matter! Lucky for us, we've started the first week of the year with today's Dilbert feature about the consultant who utters the classic remark: "blah, blah platform."