Stories by Brandon Butler

Sept. 19, 2012 will go down as a big day for OpenStack.

OpenStack is a big project with a lot of supporters. But just who makes up OpenStack?

The Cloud computing market will grow almost 20% this year to become a $109 billion industry, research firm Gartner predicts, with business process as a service (BPaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) dominating the market, but infrastructure as a service (IaaS) quickly gaining momentum.

Within a few years, mobile access to cloud-based storage will be a "checkmark" feature that will be fairly ubiquitous among the major vendors, predicts 451 Research Group analyst Simon Anderson. We're not quite there yet, but more and more vendors are rolling out the feature.

VMware is in OpenStack now, but not everyone thinks that's such a good idea.

As a car manufacturer how do you express that your vehicles have the latest and greatest cutting-edge technology? Use the buzzwords.

The National Institute for Standards in Technology has a definition of what Cloud computing is that's fairly agreed upon within the industry. But research firm Gartner says there's still a lot of Cloud-washing, or market confusion on exactly what the technology is.

Dell's agreement to offer a public cloud hosted by Nirvanix leaves open the question of the company's long-term strategy.

With less VC funding and more startups in the market in the market these days, entrepreneurs looking to nail down money for their newest venture could be in for a tough time. But there are some tricks of the trade that venture capitalists say they are looking for and successfully funded companies have.

Startup ProfitBricks leverages InfiniBand technology to compete with the growing crop of cloud providers offering powerful cloud-based machines

VMware is now officially a part of OpenStack.

Having a cloud computing startup has at some times felt like being part of the California Gold Rush, says Nand Mulchandani, CEO and co-founder of ScaleXtreme, a 2-year-old company focused on easing management of multi-cloud environments.

While big-name players such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Verizon and VMware sit atop the burgeoning cloud computing market, an entire ecosystem of early stage startups are looking to stake their claim, too.

Mergers and acquisitions are a steady source of churn in the technology industry and for cloud-service provider Rackspace, the company's M&A strategy has allowed it to expand into new areas of service, and beef up its existing offerings.

The OpenStack Board of Directors met this week and on the agenda was a somewhat surprising action item: Vote on whether or not to accept VMware - once thought to be a competitor to the project - into the increasingly popular who's-who club of cloud computing.