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."

HP and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) have identified the top cloud computing security threats in a new document which features research on the subject.   The CSA has provided a warning to organizations to be aware of technology that accumulates sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers and employee information.     Prevention is less expensive that cleaning up after a data loss or regulatory compliance violation, which require notification and system modification.   Chris Whitener, HP's chief security strategist, noted that although cloud computing can reduce capital expenditures, managing risks is often overlooked.  "The No. 1 thing you shouldn't do is approach this with complete ignorance," Whitener stated. "And unfortunately, this is something that a lot of people do. Understand and limit your risk profile. If you approach this with complete abandon, you're asking for it." 

CA Inc. is moving forward with its latest cloud computing acquisition by buying 3Tera.  The acquisition bolsters CA’s abilities to offer private and public cloud solutions by adding 3 Tera’s AppLogic to the CA portfolio.    It is CA Inc.’s third such cloud related acquisition, as it bought Oblicore recently in 2010 and Cassatt in the summer of 2009. Jay Fry, vice president of business unit strategy for CA explained what attracted CA to make the acquisition. "The most interesting thing about 3Tera is their ability to give both service providers and enterprises a way to take existing applications and bring them to private and public cloud environments via an elegant interface. The process used to be done very manually, but AppLogic automates it and smooths that transition," Fry said.