Amazon Web Services has been going through a much publicised outage, which has lasted by all appearances more than 12 hours. A range of services including Hootsuite, Reddit, Heroku, Foursquare, Quora and others have all faced major disruptions.

Software company, Altium (ASX:ALU), has announced the successful take over of Australian Cloud application development company, Morfik Technology.

It is 8pm midweek and three senior executives at Altium are working on a document they need first thing the next day — a presentation to staff about behavioural change. The program manager is editing text; the company president is asking questions about the program; and CIO, Alan Perkins, is answering his president’s questions.

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.