Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Red Hat, and VMware also rank high up on a survey by IT consulting firm BTC Logic

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 of infrastructures to support emerging cloud networks.

A new quarterly report from BTC Logic, an IT consulting firm, attempts to rank the top cloud players, and puts them into seven broad categories: cloud foundations, infrastructure, network services, platforms, applications, security and management.

The SaaS service provides IT governance for a company's Google Docs, to identify files at risk of exposure to unauthorized users inside or outside the company.

Google's Google Docs service is an easy -- and popular -- way for businesses to create, collaborate and provide access to documents, both internally and with sub-contractors, suppliers, customers and other non-employees. But this also means that it's dangerously easy for employees to leave documents exposed -- accessible -- to the wrong parties, or to lose track when, say, somebody leaves a company but still retains access.

As with all security concerns, the corollary is, where companies cannot satisfy compliance and other regulatory requirements, they can't allow employees to use tools that could improve productivity and speed.  Even if exposed data is not copied or misused, industry or government regulations can result in significant fines simply because of the exposure. And data not subject to these regulations and fines might contain information of value to a competitor or other party.

Good follow-up to a recent blog post on The Daily Telegraphs move into the Cloud

The Daily Telegraph appears to have its head in the clouds, though this is not meant in any way to be a criticism.

Indeed, in cyber circles, it is regarded as a major plus that the paper has embraced, to use the jargon, "a cloud adoption strategy".

A quick piece on the video editor encapsulated within YouTube's growing services - pretty cool option if your not savvy with Apple's products (iMovie/Final Cut Pro) or are just wanting to give video editing a try.

Up until now, if YouTube users wanted to combine multiple clips into a single video, they had to use offline editing tools. But YouTube recently rolled out cloud-based video editing tools, giving users a whole new way to remix their existing video assets online.

As detailed in the Google operating system blog, the new YouTube editor allows users to trim video, mix and match clips — even add music. And while the new offering won’t replace more robust video editing software — like Apple’s Final Cut Pro — it will enable users to combine their videos in new and interesting ways.

Valuable Blog post from Visual Website Optimizer:

We are in the process of finalizing pricing for my startup Visual Website Optimizer, which is an A/B and Multivariate testing tool. As you can imagine, fixing price is one of the toughest decisions that a startup has to (inevitably) take. Once fixed, it could be extremely difficult to change it without annoying a lot of customers. We want to be extra sure that we don’t end up under- or over-pricing Visual Website Optimizer. So, how do we decide what to charge?

Asking beta users can be one of the strategies and we actually used that for VWO. However, it turned out to be not the best of our ideas because users actually correlate price with quality. Further, if a product is innovative (like VWO is), users aren’t able to rationally determine its price as they would do in established markets (read this research paper [PDF]). Hence, asking users what a new product should cost yields half-baked information as they have little or no reference points to determine the ideal price.

Microsoft CEO talks about new competition with Google, Amazon, and Salesforce, and why CIOs now are ready for cloud computing.

 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has sent a message of late that Microsoft is "all in" when it comes to cloud computing. In an interview with InformationWeek editors, Ballmer made clear that this all-in cloud computing bet isn't merely a long-term, over-the-horizon play. The cloud growth--"hockey stick" growth, he said -- is taking off right now. And Ballmer makes a passionate case for how the investment Microsoft has made in cloud computing products and infrastructure over the last five years makes it different from rivals Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.

We pushed to clarify--when does that hockey stick growth take off? We're not there yet, right? "I don't know. It sure feels like we're there today to me," Ballmer said. He added, however, that most lines of business software--industry-specific applications or transaction systems, for example--aren't going to the cloud en masse yet. Platform as a service offerings, like Microsoft's Azure, haven't taken off. But with what he calls "information worker infrastructure" -- think Exchange, SharePoint, and Office software -- CIOs are ready to move quickly to the cloud.

"Look, I don't want to oversell or undersell, but the truth of the matter is there is not an enterprise customer I visit today where this is not an issue -- just not," Ballmer said. Any CIO considering an upgrade to the company's e-mail or other collaboration platforms has to at least consider going to a cloud-based infrastructure. "Everybody is saying, look, next time I touch anything, I'm going. If I'm not touching anything, maybe I don't go," Ballmer said. "But if I'm really going to touch something, I'm going to have this [cloud] discussion."