IT services company, Melbourne IT (ASX: MLB) has blamed an 11 per cent year-on-year decrease in revenue on the impact of the strong Australian dollar and soft market conditions in the US and Europe.

Melbourne IT may be able to offer discounts to some enterprise and SMB customers as backup/restoration requirements change in the future, according to the hosting provider's chief technology officer.

Melbourne IT (ASX: MLB) managing director, Theo Hnarakis, has warned that the rising Australian dollar and the 20 June ICANN decision on domain liberalisation may affect the hosting company’s full year results.

Melbourne IT has advised of an increase in domain name 'cyber squatting', with large Australian financial companies and government agencies falling victim to phishing attempts as a result of the lack of foresight.

Domain name registrar and IT services provider Melbourne IT Ltd expects underlying earnings to rise in 2011, after booking a lower full year net profit in 2010.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.

Australian companies of all types are cautiously shifting applications out of the data centre and into the cloud. Despite all the hype, cloud computing is proving to be one trend that's more than just hot air.