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Microsoft is shifting its strategy away from pitching itself as a company that can offer companies a choice of software or hosted services, toward pushing the cloud, an executive said on Thursday at the software giant’s annual financial analyst meeting.
A year ago, Microsoft was telling customers that the company is uniquely positioned because it offers [...]

Interest in the SaaS (software as a service) delivery model is growing to the point that by 2012, almost 85 percent of new vendors will be focused on SaaS services, according to new research from analyst firm IDC.
Also by 2012, some two-thirds of new offerings from established vendors will be sold as SaaS, IDC said.
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Drupal Gardens, the planned cloud version of the open source Drupal content management system, went into a public beta stage Thursday, thus making it widely available for tryouts , said Drupal founder Dries Buytaert.
The technology previously had been available through a controlled, private beta program, said Buytaert, founder and CTO of Acquia, in an interview [...]

Google and IBM came out on top as the leading cloud computing vendors in a survey of developers revealed this week by Evans Data.
The biannual Evans Cloud Development Survey 2010, which polled more than 400 software developers, found that more than 40 percent cited Google as the public cloud leader. Nearly 30 percent identified IBM [...]

Rackspace’s contribution of code to a new open-source project called OpenStack could help establish a counterweight to larger and proprietary players like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), according to some observers.
OpenStack, which was announced Monday, will include the code behind Rackspace’s Cloud Files and Cloud Servers technology. NASA is also involved, contributing software that runs [...]

Amazon and IBM are the “cloud champions” according to a new report, but Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Red Hat, and VMware are also among the list of heavyweights in the emerging cloud computing field.
All tech vendors are embracing the cloud. Even those that don’t provide public cloud services are fighting to become the top builders [...]

Enterprise software provider Metastorm has launched an online workflow modeling service, called Metastorm M3, the company announced on Tuesday.
The service, which is hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform, can be used to model a variety of different enterprise concerns, such as goals, systems, workflows, rules, and projects. The service provides 23 modeling objects from which [...]

Just a day before Microsoft drops support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the company announced on Monday that people running some versions of Windows 7 can “downgrade” to the aged operating system for up to 10 years.
The move is highly unusual. In the past, Microsoft has terminated downgrade rights — which let customers [...]

On Monday, during the kickoff of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference being held this week in Washington D.C., Microsoft announced that it would be releasing a version of its Windows Azure cloud computing platform that can be run as part of an appliance offering.
The appliance name may be a bit misleading though — Microsoft’s Azure Appliance [...]

Developers are hopping on the Windows 7 bandwagon, according to survey results released Monday by database and developer tools vendor Embarcadero Technologies.
In a survey of 606 respondents conducted in May, Embarcadero found 54 percent indicated they were developing applications for Windows 7. Another 25 percent said they plan to develop applications for Microsoft’s latest client [...]