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What's different about cloud computing versus the forms of computing that have gone before? It's really just a matter of scale, isn't it? The Google or Amazon.com or eBay data centers are maybe a little bigger than a big enterprise data center, right? Wrong. One answer lies in an example like Hadoop.

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Five copies of "Behind the Cloud" have arrived at my desk, two intended for fellow IW staffers and three for me, an embarrassment of riches. It's Marc Benioff's book on how Salesforce.com was created and built into a successful company. I am reading it avidly… but some disclosures will apparently have to wait for the sequel.

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Whether your company's data center is a couple of servers stashed in a closet or a gleaming, state-of-the-art climate-controlled facility, you're still facing the same set of challenges: how to keep the IT lights on while controlling costs, take advantage of new technologies to stay competitive, and position your company for an economic recovery in the midst of the toughest times for IT that many of us can remember.

On Wednesday, October 21, 2009, help is on the way.

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AccelOps' latest software release adds new features for network and data center service management, both for premises and SaaS deployments.

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Qwaq rebrands itself as Teleplace as it continues to preach the gospel of virtual worlds for business collaboration.

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Ninety percent of companies don't put their Web applications or sites through performance tests, according to Tom Lounibos, CEO of cloud testing specialist Soasta. Which companies have taken that extra step? Soasta is introducing a certification program to sort out the testers from the non-testers.

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Mi5 Networks, which makes a Web security appliance, will be integrated into Symantec's product line later this year.

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There's been a persistent rumor circulating that Virtual Iron is about to be acquired, fueled in part by a recent Jefferies & Co. research report that said Oracle was interested in the virtualization startup. Why would Oracle, with its own Oracle VM, want a third-tier player in the virtualization market?

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I arrived in Austin, Texas, today to go talk to IBM, again, about how it's helping make the planet smarter, this time focusing on how Web 2.0 technologies can help companies become more green. I am well prepared for Austin because I was just here in November (editor's note: It was October, Fritz), and I have a photogenic memory (editor's note: uh, photographic, and no).

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Semantic search is like porn: I'm pretty sure I'll know it when I see it. So when semantic search upstart Truevert came by for a visit, I got all googly (I think I might have even screamed "yahoo"). The Truevert system, powered by OrcaTec's discovery toolkit, is narrowly defined around green, but it's definitely an eye-opening, fresh approach to an elusive problem.

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I'm sure just about everything can happen in the cloud these days -- maybe even things I don't want to know about. But when we're starting to help companies perform API management in the cloud, which is what Mashery is doing, it's probably a pretty good sign.

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Sometimes it's the tiniest things that thrill me. In the middle of the gigantic TVs and the booming sound systems and the magic acts and the private suites and the thrumming parties was Ctera, an 18-employee company headquartered in Israel. When they showed me their device, I literally did a double-take (luckily off camera; very awkward). The CloudPlug is a tiny plug with a processor inside, an Ethernet jack, and a USB port, with which you can turn any USB device into a NAS and back up your data to Ctera's cloud-based service. And it's so damned cute.

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The author of MySQL, Monty Widenius, has taken a shot at Sun's release of MySQL 5.1, saying it wasn't ready yet, and pointed an accusatory finger at Marten Mickos, senior VP of Sun databases. He's also not bothered to deny rumors that's he's resigned from Sun. I don't know about the rumors, but it's clear to me that Elvis has left the building.

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Virtualization offers many potential savings through server consolidation and reduced server administration labor. But it also poses the age-old hazard of vendor lock-in. The field is young enough that the market leader, VMware, and the bigger companies that are following in its footsteps have not yet been called to account for their proprietary moves. But that's increasingly hard to bear when there's a solution so close at hand.

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You know that rash, that one you don't want to talk about but that you keep scratching and wondering about but you're afraid to go to the doctor and get it checked out? I'm kidding -- but seriously, if you did, you could go to MEDgle first and find out how seriously to take it. This self-funded startup is yet another interesting way to exploit the expansiveness of the Web to create a new business opportunity.

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Virtualizing desktops is clearly an area of the enterprise that begs for IT action, but the variety of ways to go about it indicates that this technology segment is in deep ferment. Will those who have dominated the desktop so far rule a virtualized future? Perhaps, but where there's fermentation, there's also a whiff of disruption.

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Got a lot on your plate? How would you like to be the IT shop? While the common belief is that one-person IT departments are typically the stuff of start-ups and mom-and-pop businesses, that's not always the case.

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It's always interesting seeing a company as it's just coming out of hiding and starting to market its product. Mapness is just such a company, and you could sense the wide-eyed fear of expectation as Wojciech Kosinski talked about this online journal site.

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Lots of talk this week about OpenSolaris from Sun as the market treads gently on what it may mean. Is this Sun doing the right thing or chasing the latest trend? Similarly, Sun was at our Startup Camp in London last month, rubbing elbows with and offering help to fledgling startups left and right. What gives?

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It's somewhat hard to categorize Polish startup Flaker, and without playing around with it (it's in private beta at the moment), it's difficult to see how powerful it might be, but it's an interesting idea: take user activities on Web services and aggregate those into a profile.

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I have a friend who develops mobile applications. It's just him in his pajamas in his basement, cranking out code for every mobile phone platform (native OSes and some of the mobile portals). To keep up with user feedback and bug reports, he farms out code fixes to a huge web of developers-for-hire. It's dicey, but it works for him, especially since the work can be small, but very interrupt-driven. In a sense, that seems to be what Peopleperhour, a new U.K.-based startup, is providing.

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Eseye is a 3-month-old startup we met up with at Startup Camp in London last month. It essentially provides embedded device makers with the ability to link those devices back to the enterprise network using a mobile network. The beauty of this is it makes those devices infinitely smarter: You can send or receive data from them, making them a form of Web appliance.

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At Startup Camp in London, I met Nick Halstead, the erstwhile founder behind fav.or.it, a new blog aggregation site that's been widely discussed in the, um, blogosphere (there's a dog chasing its tail somewhere in that statement).

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When we held Startup Camp in London, WatZatSong was one of the more intriguing new ventures. Raphael Arbuz' project lets the community help you figure out songs that you know some lyrics to, or a tune stuck in your head.

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How can you lose with someone named Fabio at the helm, talking about how his company, Veedow.com, will do for shopping what Pandora does for music? Veedow will customize a recommendation-based social shopping site based on the items and styles that appeal specifically to you.

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Traditionally, Ruby On Rails developers have had difficulty taking applications from their development systems to deployment (difficulties not experienced developing with PHP, ASP, or Java). But Brightbox, a U.K.-based startup showing off its wares at Startup Camp in London recently, specializes in Rails hosting.

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RPPtv sounds a little too good to be true: A Web-based uploading, sequencing, editing, and output program for consumers and broadcasters. It's also free, available any day from RPPtv's site or as a Facebook application.

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You may have heard about bands discovering a fan base (or vice versa) on MySpace or YouTube; or about the launch of some new Web TV show on YouTube which makes its way onto regular television because of its popularity (to some degree, South Park is a great example). Now, thanks to fun startup WebCanvas, artists can have the same opportunity. The WebCanvas presentation at Startup Camp last week in London was impressive in its creativity. But these guys, who finished second in Camp voting for best Startup, have some work to do in several areas.

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As I write this blog post -- a reflection on Startup Camp London -- I'm on a Boeing 777 that's racing across the Atlantic to Boston's Logan airport. This plane is full of technology. Presumably, the first class cabin has seats that can convert into beds or that can pivot and face a variety of directions. I heard that everyone up there also gets Bose noise canceling headphones. I'm not sure. It's a secretive place that only people who've paid 10 times what I've paid to cross the Atlantic are allowed to see. One thing I do know: several of the entrepreneurs we saw at Startup Camp London will one day be able to buy seats in that cabin. For their entire families.

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I have a friend who does everything in Excel. I mean EVERYthing. If he were ever to write a novel, I am convinced he would do it in Excel. He obsesses about balancing his books at home on Excel; organizing trips in Excel. So when we went to Italy a couple of years ago and shared expenses, he built us a handy spreadsheet. There was nothing complicated about it, but its elegance and logic just made everything tidy -- well, except the part where I owed him money. Now I don't need the spreadsheet, though. Enter Scred, one of the attendees at last week's Startup Camp in London.

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There's nothing more charming than a humble entrepreneur like MySQL co-founder David Axmark. Zero ego, maximum success, achieved from a place of pure personal passion and the observation of need rather than blatant commercialization. Axmark made it clear to the Startup Camp audience in London this past weekend that while most companies start up with a business plan that includes an exit strategy, Axmark and his partner Monty Widenius started simply to create, to fill a need, because it was fun.

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My colleague, David Berlind, held Startup Camp in London Friday and Saturday, for an eager crowd of hotshot startup companies interested in sharing experiences, getting feedback, or maybe just looking for that gentle pat on the back to keep them going through 18 hour workdays and family sacrifices. Startup Camp is but one in a series of what Berlind calls "unconferences" where there is no structured agenda except for the one the crowd creates when they arrive. This is the "format for you to share your common passion for being an entrepreneur," Berlind told the crowd.

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When wildly successful startup companies review history, it can often seem instead like a revisionist history; as if success ever happens according to a perfectly mapped out vision. There are two key distinctions when it comes to Salesforce.com: first, many of its early employees came from Oracle or Siebel or both, so the templates for success (in some cases for better or worse) had been somewhat molded and embedded; second, regardless of any contrived formula, there are phenomenal lessons other startups should ponder.

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The AppNite demo presentation that drew the biggest collective "ah's" and head nods at O'Reilly's ETech was Underlying's Dipity, described as a Wikipedia for timelines -- a way to organize the Web using time. Many companies are experimenting with timeline concepts, including Google, because it's a new way to give information more context. In the case of Dipity, timelines become a way to bring communities together.

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I know. It sounds just like Google. It’s search. How does Google allow it? It helps that the last name of one of Krugle’s founders is Krugler. But the other founder is Steve Larsen -- couldn’t they have named it after him? And was his name really always Ken Krugler, or did he change it just so they could do this? I will answer none of those questions. But I will tell you that I wish I were a developer, because Krugle, a code search engine, is an awesome idea. (Note, we have covered Krugle in this space before.)

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