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Red Hat announced today that it's beefing up the OpenShift platform it unveiled in March. The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) play from Red Hat now supports Java Enterprise Edition 6 (EE6) via JBoss Application Server 7 (AS7) and MemBase in OpenShift Flex.

Today Red Hat announced two new services: CloudForms, a cloud management product for private and hybrid clouds and OpenShift, a multiple platform-as-a-service. CloudForms is now acceping beta sign-ups and OpenShift is open for non-production use.

Surprisingly, Red Hat is not yet open-sourcing the code used to create these services, but according to RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady the company promises to release OpenShift's code in the future.

Red Hat today announced JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, which it calls "a cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed data cache." Cameron Purdy defines a data grid as "a system composed of multiple servers that work together to manage information and related operations - such as computations - in a distributed environment."

Like Apache Cassandra and Riak, Red Hat's data grid is influenced by Amazon's distributed data store Dynamo. The product will cache data in-memory and distribute among multiple servers, which will be useful for cloud computing.

Ceylon is a new enterprise development language being developed by Red Hat employee Gavin King. The team plans to release a compiler later this year. King detailed the project at QCon Beijing 2011, and slides from his presentation were published earlier this month. When finished, it will run on the Java Virtual Machine and feature static typing, automatic memory management and other features missing from Java. According to King's presentation, the Ceylon team will strive to make the new language "easy to learn and understand."

It's currently in a very early stage. In a blog post, King writes, "All we have right now is a specification, an ANTLR grammar, and an incomplete type checker." Regarding whether it's a "Java killer," King wrote, "Ceylon isn't Java, it's a new language that's deeply influenced by Java, designed by people who are unapologetic fans of Java. Java's not dying anytime soon, so nothing's killing it."

We try to tell you everything you need to know about the cloud here every week, but sometimes there's just too much news and analysis for us to give everything the space it deserves. This posts highlights some important events and interesting thoughts in cloud clouding from around the Web.

As we wrote yesterday, the summer of 2010 has been marked in the cloud computing world by open-sourcing technologies and multi-vendor agreements.

We started the summer with OpenStack, the Rackspace and NASA open-cloud initiative. Earlier this week, Red Hat open-sourced its Deltacloud API.

Also this week, newScale, rPath, Eucalyptus Systems and Momentum SI teamed up to begin offering a self-service cloud.

Despite Amazon's leadership and market share in cloud computing, many in the industry have been reluctant to crown Amazon S3's API as the standard, arguing it's too early and too vendor-specific.

And while the former may still be true, the latter could be addressed with yesterday's announcement by Red Hat that the company is open-sourcing its Deltacloud API. More importantly, perhaps, Red Hat has contributed Deltacloud to the Apache Software Foundation where it is currently an incubator project. This moves the API out of the control of a single vendor and under the supervision of an external governing body.

Open-source software is at an inflection point in the enterprise. According to a survey by Accenture, more than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increasing their investment in it this year, and almost 40% said that they expect to migrate mission-critical software to open source within the next 12 months.

The survey reflects a pattern that's best illustrated by Red Hat's most recent financial results. In the past year, its revenues were up 20%. All parts of its business are showing growth, with particular strength in middleware. The company signed the largest deal in its history during the last quarter. According to Datamation, Red Hat renewed all of its top 25 deals during the quarter at over 120% of their original value.

RedHat recently announced that premium enterprise subscription customers are now able to move their Red Hat Linux licenses to the Amazon cloud in the form of EC2 instance. Amazon EC2 is the first cloud provider that Red Hat is supporting for this service.

If you have a block of Red Hat Linux licenses, you can now enroll with the company to enable these to be authorized on an EC2 instance with your Amazon account. We took a few moments to sit down with the team from Red Hat to learn more about the details of the partnership.

IBM is extending its cloud infrastructure to the IBM Cloud and enhancing its offering with commercial- and enterprise-grade test and development services with a broad reach of partners and collaborative approaches. The effort follows its launch in November of a test-and-development cloud-based service. With this announcement, IBM is laying the foundation for a cloud ecosystem that will differentiate the company from Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of the news is that PayPal is joining IBM as a partner to offer services to enterprise clients. This puts IBM on a a direct trajectory into the heart of the market - with Amazon in its sights. By partnering with PayPal, IBM is laying the framework for more transaction-oriented services with smart phone customers the prime target for applications developed in its partner community.