IBM announced Tuesday its latest Azure services which supports developers and testers with an eye on providing public cloud services.   The latest IBM cloud services make available its Web Sphere suite of applications as well as well as its Informix and DB2 databases.    IBM is extending its products and services to strengthen its position against competition from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.   "IBM has been talking a good cloud game for the last year or so," blogged Forrester Research analyst James Staten. "But its public cloud efforts, outside of application hosting have been a bit of wait and see. Well, the company is clearly getting its act together in the public cloud space with today’s announcement."    As part of the announcement, IBM selected Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) over VMware’s hypervisor.    Scott Crenshaw VP and GM of Red Hat’s cloud business stated “It’s a big milestone”.  

Leveraging social networks has become an important marketing strategy for many companies and this requires serious management of the process.   Awareness, Inc. newly announced Social Marketing Hub helps company plan and implement and manage their social networking strategy.   The company launched its beta program and has some major corporations that are participating including Sony, Progressive Insurance, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Kodak, Best Buy and ASOS.com.  "Many brands, including ours, are realizing that focusing on only one social media channel to reach an audience isn't enough to get results desired. As channels are added, so are the complexities in measuring the impact you have on the marketplace," stated John Bernier, Manager, Social and Emerging Media at Best Buy. "We're excited about the possibilities that the Social Marketing Hub brings to our ability to carefully measure all our social media activities from one central console."

Google continues to the search engine of choice for the laptop and desktop, however a new deal between Microsoft and Motorola brings Bing to the Motorola Android smartphones.   According to Motorola, its decision provides, "increased personalization and empowering its end users”.    In the growing market in China Motorola currently offers four Android smartphones, with Bing models coming to the market this month.   The ongoing rivalry between Apple and Google may have created a space for Bing, as rumors have surfaced that Apple is re-thinking its use of the Google mobile search.   The implications are huge as Apple looks a future product launches of the iPhone and iPad.   Currently Google mobile search is a major play in the mobile marketplace as the search solution for the Apple iPhone distributed by AT&T.

CA’s all cash $350 buy of Nimsoft, known for its performance software, gives CA access to smaller clients where Nimsoft has built its customer base.   This acquisition contrasts with CA’s acquisition of Oblicore and 3tera in early 2010 and NetQoS and Cassatt in 2009, which focused on the larger enterprise clients with cloud management requirements.   451 Group analysts note that Nimsoft has 800 midmarket clients which use its managed service provider (MSP) product to provide cloud software management.   451 Group went on to say that CA claims that it has 14,000 potential clients that can utilize its products.   “With our planned acquisition of Nimsoft, CA will be equipped to capture several important growth market segments — including emerging enterprises, emerging national economies, and the MSPs who are providing these customers with IT management services via the cloud,” Chris O’Malley, a CA executive vice president, has written in a statement. “Penetration of these markets will further expand our global leadership in IT management and complement our existing strength with large enterprise customers.”

Google’s Apps Marketplace opened the online doors for business on Tuesday with 50 companies joining in the offerings.    The most popular offerings were related to Google cloud apps that are Software-as-a-Service focused.   Lesser known companies joined in with CRM, fax and ERP apps, but there were well known companies such as Intuit with its payroll software and content management from Box.net.   Creative offerings from companies such as Manymoon, with its free "social productivity, project management, and task management" app, were part of the mix. Atlassian Software known for its hosted software development suit will bring its customer to Google Apps, but will benefit from the Google Apps that enable word processing, calendar, and chat within the Atlassian suite.

Avaya’s new offering for small business reduces the price point for unified communication by 40 percent, which features a new combination card that provides support for IP, digital and analog phones.  The collaborative tools include video, instant messaging and presence.   The lasted offering utilizes an SD card, which replaces the flash card and license that was required previously.   It is offered as part of the 6.0 version of IP office which is browser based.  The 6.0 version features improved instant messaging, more presence features and the ability to archive voice messaging.

RightNow, known for its Web customer experience management software, believes that the cloud provides a new opportunity for cloud software vendors to provide fair pricing that reflects a new level of economies of scale.   RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte stated  The “Cloud Challenge” is directed at other major players in this space including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, and other vendors.   "We are challenging the industry to finally deliver on the full promise of the cloud. I challenge our peers to step up and engage with clients like true cloud vendors, not on-premise vendors in cloud clothing," stated RightNow's chief marketing officer, Jason Mittelstaedt. 

After a major cloud computing partnership with Microsoft with in December, NetApp has now announced a comprehensive set of management tools to enable service providers to build private and public clouds for both storage and virtualization customers.   The latest products from NetApp not only enhance functionality in providing services and apps for enterprise clients, it bolsters functionality and security for IT service provider cloud deployments for their customers.  "NetApp has a proven track record of successfully teaming with leading service providers to power their cloud service offerings," Patrick Rogers, NetApp's (NASDAQ: NTAP) vice president of solutions and alliances, wrote in a statement. "Our strategy in this space is to enable the success of our solution partners, not compete with them, and through them provide a broad and open set of industry cloud services for enterprise IT customers."

According to Brendan Barnicle, senior research analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, Microsoft has plans to spend $1 billion on its Windows Phone business during this coming year.   Bill Koefoed, general manager of Microsoft’s investor relations, revealed the plans make the hefty investment in research and development in this year alone.   Even for Microsoft, this represents a significant commitment of approximately 10 percent of the company’s R&D budget.  "In our minds, [Koefoed] ruled out them buying somebody like Palm or RIM. He didn't say it directly ... it's our conclusion.”  Barnicle stated to InternetNews.com.

Year over year numbers for January 2010 show that smartphone users are moving toward connecting to social networks via their smartphones in growing numbers.   Users are not just using their PC’s to connect with social networks as the number of smartphone users that are jump on social networks doubled from 5% to 10% when compared to January 2009.   The number of users accessing Facebook via a mobile browser grew by 112%, and Twitter grew by an amazing 347% from the previous year.  "Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web," Mark Donovan, senior VP of mobile at ComScore, wrote in a statement. "Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser."