When Tata Communications, the Indian telecommunications company, rolls out its infrastructure as a service cloud offering in America in the coming months, company officials want to claim differentiating features in the products. And one they're hoping to include is support for multiple hypervisors.

In a pairing of unlikely partners, Piston Cloud Computing announced it will work to support integration of VMware's open source platform-as-a-service offering Cloud Foundry with OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service model.

Over the past year, I've noticed a significant shift in my conversations about cloud with senior IT managers.

With Australian CIOs looking overseas for Cloud services, the need for more Australian specialist infrastructure and platform-as-a-service providers presents opportunities for the local Cloud service market, according to a new study from analyst firm, Telsyte.

Joshua McKenty, co-founder and chief executive officer of Piston Cloud, what he calls The Enterprise OpenStack Company, was in on the ground floor of OpenStack's creation, working as he was on the Anso Labs team at NASA to build a compute cloud on top of open source platform Eucalyptus. The team eventually gave up on that and wrote Nova, which NASA uses today to power its Nebula Cloud environment, and Nova was ultimately contributed to the OpenStack project, which it formed with Rackspace. McKenty left NASA after Anso was acquired by Rackspace in 2010, and formed Piston Cloud in 2011 with co-founders Gretchen Curtis (also of NASA) and Christopher MacGown of Rackspace. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently caught up with McKenty for a deep dive on why OpenStack matters and where Piston Cloud fits in.

Experienced CIOs have learned the hard way that achieving tangible benefits early in the technology lifecycle is no easy matter--whether its OO, CMMI, ITIL or SOA. Cloud computing shows promise and demands attention, but the related hoopla needs to be tempered with a good dose of business sense. The cloud, regardless of its variety, should never be considered an all-or-nothing proposition.

It seems as if every CIO comes back from a conference cocktail party demanding IT move to the cloud. While this can mean many things, including using software-as-a-service (SaaS), managed hosting, or application service providers (ASP), the demand often centers on moving applications out of your own budget-sucking data center and up to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform.

Verizon has rolled out its first cloud-computing service aimed at giving enterprise customers a secure way to host applications not only on virtual resources but also on physical, dedicated network servers.