Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) on Wednesday announced new products, solutions and services that leave the technology packaging to them, so users don't have to.

HP Neoview Advantage, HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, and HP Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services are designed to help organizations drive business and technology innovations at lower total cost via lower total hassle.

I've been ruminating the past few days on why Apple (AAPL) is doing so well with it's pricey high-end products and services during a recession. The answer came as I was reading Wednesday's New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, whom I deeply admire and read anything and everything he puts out.

Friedman points out that the winners in today's fast-shifting U.S. job market are the ones demonstrating "entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity." He says, "They are the new untouchables," in contrast to other still highly educated but less creative types.

Call it a trend – and not just a virtual one. Akamai Technologies (AKAM) is the latest tech firm to join the effort to push desktop virtualization into the mainstream with the salient message of swift return on investment (ROI) and lower total costs for PC desktop delivery.

Akamai joins HP (HPQ), Microsoft (MSFT), VMware (VMW), as well as Citrix (CTXS), Desktone and a host of others in the quest to advance the cause of desktop virtualization (aka VDI) in a sour economy. Better known for optimizing delivery of web content, video, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, Akamai just introduced a managed Internet service that optimizes the delivery of virtualized client applications and PC desktops.

Three industry conferences this week -- one underlying theme: enterprise cloud computing.

If you could sum up VMworld 2009, the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World with one uber topic, cloud takes it -- which begs whether the cloud hype curve has yet peaked.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

VMware’s (VMW) proposed $362 million acquisition of SpringSource is all about getting serious in competing with Salesforce.com (CRM) and Google (GOOG) App Engine as the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud with the technology that everybody already uses.

TIBCO Software (TIBX) is expanding its governance solutions for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and will now provide support for Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) SOA Systinet lifecycle governance software.

ActiveMatrix Policy Manager and Service Performance Manager from TIBCO combined with HP SOA Systinet are designed to reduce risk and improve management of SOA environments, including identifying and defining appropriate services, managing the lifecycle of service assets, and measuring effectiveness.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog . Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

Who says there are no second acts in life?

Positioning its cloud hosting services as an alternative to Amazon’s (AMZN) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Rackspace (RAX) announced Tuesday the public availability of Cloud Servers API based on representational state transfer.

Taking an open-source approach, Rackspace’s 43,000 cloud-computing customers played a major role in the API specifications, explained Emil Sayegh, general manager for The Rackspace Cloud, formerly branded as Mosso cloud hosting. They overwhelmingly preferred the newer lighter-weight REST approach to the older heavy-duty SOAP standard that Amazon uses, he said.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog . Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

This week's announcement by Oracle (ORCL) of the rollouts of Fusion Middleware 11g is a bit anticlimactic in that the details are pretty much according to the plan that came out exactly a year ago today. Although the Fusion stack is comprised of multiple parts, internally developed and acquired, the highlight is that it represents the fruition of the BEA acquisition. Oracle had Fusion middleware prior to acquiring BEA, but there’s little question that BEA was the main event. WebLogic filled the donut hole in the middle of the Fusion stack with a server that was far more popular than Oracle Containers for Java EE (OC4J). Single-handedly, BEA catapulted Oracle Fusion into becoming a major player in middleware.

After nearly a 20-month gestation period, Oracle (ORCL) today announced the arrival this month of the next generation of its sprawling middleware family, the long-anticipated Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Billed as a "complete, integrated, and hot-pluggable" middleware set of suites, the new software infrastructure offerings, which the Redwood Shores, Calif. computer giant previewed in November 2007, bolsters functionality, integration and business intelligence (BI) benefits across its vast product portfolio, including new capabilities for Oracle SOA Suite, WebLogic Suite, Web Center Suite, and opening debut for Identity Management as a suite.

Oracle (ORCL) has paved the way for developers to more easily build data models that create and update existing databases. The Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, which integrates with Oracle SQL Developer, arrived Monday as a standalone tool that supports logical, relational, multi-dimensional and data type modeling.

Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., had originally released a free version of the tool as an "early adopter" release. The full version is now available for $3,000 per named user. The new tool features multi-layered design and generation capabilities to produce conceptual entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) and transform them to relational models. Users can build, extend and modify a model as well as compare with existing designs.

Even in this global recession, one-third of IT organizations plan to increase virtualization, including cloud-computing initiatives, in the next two years, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Microsoft (MSFT).

Seeing the downturn as an opportunity to upgrade, nearly two-thirds of 1,200 IT professionals surveyed in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan plan to invest in new infrastructure technology, according to results released this week.

LAS VEGAS -- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Tuesday unveiled its new HP Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) solutions, aimed at recession-beleaguered IT executives who need to cut costs, prepare for a service-based future, and run their departments like a business -- all at the same time.

FP&A is part of HP’s expanding IT Financial Management (ITFM) portfolio designed to help chief information officers (CIOs) and IT managers create comprehensive financial transparency, optimize costs deeply but prudently, and newly demonstrate the business value of IT services.

LAS VEGAS -- Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) opened its Tech Form 2009 conference here Monday evening with a portrait of a future in which everything in IT is delivered -- and perhaps consumed -- as a service.

Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President for HP's Technology Solutions Group (TSG), said the recession and technology advances have combined to offer a new era in computing, one where a hybrid of sourcing and delivery means moves all IT assets to the level of a service.

Combining platform as a service (PaaS) with a built-in ability to integrate and manage hybrid cloud deployments, TIBCO Software (TIBX) Wednesday threw its hat in the cloud computing ring by taking its middleware and Java development and deployment platforms to new heights.

Coinciding with the JavaOne conference and coming on the heels of other PaaS announcements this week, TIBCO debuted TIBCO Silver via an online virtual conference. While general availability of Silver is not due until 2010, private beta launches begin this month, as the start of a rolling series of expanding beta launches this year.

HP (HPQ) and Desktone make strong market moves into the fast-growing desktops as a service (Daas) space, also know as desktop virtualization and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

These new products and services show an aggressive ramp-up and sophistication to deliver a fast-track to DaaS. HP and Desktone, among others, are banking on the down economy to whet the appetites of many kinds of companies -- and myriad uses -- for these far lower cost approaches for delivering full PC functionality without the full PC and local maintenance headaches.

The impact of cloud computing is most often analyzed through its expected disruption of IT vendors, or the media, or as an economic balm for developers and Web 2.0 start-ups.

Yet cloud computing is much more than a just newcomer on the Internet hype curve. The heritage of what cloud computing represents dates back to the dawn of information technology (IT), to the very beginnings of how government agencies and large commercial enterprises first accessed powerful computers to solve complex problems.

Well, okay, maybe that headline is misleading, but the details aren’t.

Detroit-based software giant Compuware (CPWR) isn’t really dropping the quality of its products, but it is selling off its Quality Solutions product line to help refocus its business on areas where it can compete most effectively.

LAS VEGAS -- Wasting no time in bringing a needed cohesion across its products and solutions, IBM on Monday at its IMPACT 2009 event here unveiled a cloud-based business process modeling (BPM) service, tighter alignment with Amazon (AMZN), better complex event processing (CEP) integration, re-introduced a WebSphere private cloud appliance and double-downed on a slew of its industry framework solutions.

Under the umbrella of spurring on a smarter planet, the IBM push combines many of Big Blue's strengths with the goal of taking out complexity and cutting costs as its customers seek much greater business efficiency in a recession-wracked world. The moves also further IBM's embrace and commitment to services oriented architecture (SOA), but spread its benefits both deeper and wider than the earlier infrastructure push alone.

People talk about “The Cloud” as if it is one unified platform, but it’s the exact opposite, argues Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Misconceptions of what “The Cloud” is and a general lack of standardization among the vendors offering cloud computing services is bound to be confusing to organizations contemplating moving enterprise applications out onto the Internet.