SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18 -- Splunk, the IT Search company, today announced that leading next generation technology companies, including Coghead, Elastra, GoGrid, Mashery, and RightScale, have deployed Splunk IT Search to strengthen their offerings and reliably deliver services, applications, platforms and infrastructure, via the cloud.

SAN MATEO, Calif., Dec. 18 -- As the year draws to a close, many companies are left wondering what next year will bring for this year's hottest technology trend -- cloud computing. To answer these questions, Appirio today released its top 10 predictions for how cloud computing will evolve in 2009 and the impact those trends will have on IT and business.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Dec. 17 -- SOASTA, the leader in cloud-based testing solutions, today announced an alliance with Savvis Inc., a global leader in outsourced managed computing and network infrastructure for IT applications. The alliance will give Savvis customers a state-of-the-art, on-demand testing service in the cloud, enabling affordable, highly scalable load and performance testing of web applications and services.

BOSTON, Dec. 16 -- Seanodes, the creator and leading developer of Shared Internal Storage solutions, today announced that cloud services provider Aenigma has developed a new multi-tiered storage infrastructure backed by Exanodes software to increase the reliability and performance of its High Availability Application Hosting Platform for as little as one-twentieth the cost of a similarly configured Fibre Channel SAN.

RESTON, Va., Dec. 16 -- Parabon Computation, a veteran provider of extreme-scale grid computing software and solutions, announced today a licensing deal for the deployment of the company's Frontier Grid Platform on 10,000 computers within the Defense Contracting Management Association (DCMA).

NEW YORK, Dec. 15 -- GigaSpaces Technologies today announced the availability of GigaSpaces' eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) for MySQL Enterprise, addressing the scalability and performance needs of demanding MySQL Enterprise customers.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 -- WaveMaker, the leading visual development platform for Web applications, today announced WaveMaker Cloud Edition. WaveMaker Cloud Edition is the first open source, integrated development environment (IDE) for cloud computing. WaveMaker Cloud Edition lets anyone quickly build great-looking web applications that deploy to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

As enterprises continue to hop on board the ever-expanding phenomenon of cloud computing, it is becoming difficult to imagine a future without the cloud.

ARMONK, N.Y., Dec. 11 -- IBM today introduced its the newest cloud service for Web conferencing, Lotus Sametime Unyte 8.2. IBM also announced a new distribution partnership with InterCall to deliver Lotus Sametime Unyte's intuitive online meeting capability to InterCall customers worldwide.

BANGALORE, India, Dec. 11 -- AT&T Inc. today announced that it has opened its first datacenter in Bangalore, India. The new datacenter will help meet the growing demand from multinational customers in India for online datacenters with highly resilient facilities, a wide range of IT infrastructure management services, supported by excellent customer services.

SINGAPORE, Dec. 10 -- Citrix Systems Inc., the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, today announced that it has been selected to deliver server virtualization infrastructure for Alatum, a ground-breaking industry-government partnership and Singapore's largest commercial grid computing platform.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 10 -- VMware Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced its intention to expand its strategic relationship with HP to include the joint development of management software solutions that manage both physical and virtual datacenter resources.

SEATTLE, Dec. 10 -- Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc., today announced that it has extended Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Europe.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 10 -- Sonoa Systems Inc., an innovative provider of cloud service gateways, today announced the availability of Sonoa Analytics, a powerful solution that enables business-level visibility and decision support for cloud services and APIs.

FREMONT, Calif., Dec. 10 -- Rackable Systems Inc., a leading provider of servers and storage products for large-scale datacenters, today announced the immediate availability of the C1002 server utilizing the company’s new high density, Eco-Logical half-depth chassis design.

Sun Microsystems has killed its once high-profile utility computing experiment, Network.com, which let customers buy computing power by the hour.

"Cloud computing" has been ill-defined and over-hyped, yet storage vendors have been quick to trot out their own "cloud storage" offerings and end users are wondering whether there's significant cost savings in these services for them, particularly in tough economic times.