Ed Oswald

Today, the European Union's Competition Commission set the stage for an antitrust showdown with Google by offering settlement ahead of four pending violations. Proposal would come from the search giant, which initial response suggests resolution won't be easy.

The case revolves around a nearly two-year old effort to determine if Google abuses its dominant position in search. Some of these concerns involve the Mountain View, Calif. company's near-stranglehold of the web advertising market, of which the European Commission received several complaints.

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While the bring-your-own-device phenomenon in IT presents a fair amount of risk to enterprise security, most companies are warming up to the idea anyway. A Cisco-sponsored survey of 600 IT and business leaders found that 95 percent of their companies allow employee-owned devices on the corporate network.

Of all companies surveyed, 36 percent support all BYOD devices, while 48 percent support a select list of devices. An additional 11 percent tolerate employee-owned devices on enterprise networks, but will offer no IT support.

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Comcast said Thursday it plans to make changes to its pricing structure to start billing for the amount of data customers use, versus the capped method in place today. The cable company will test two different pricing structures in some markets, while hard enforcement of the 250GB cap put into place in 2008 would end.

Both piloted pricing structures give users 300GB of data at a flat rate. Where they differ is in how this allotment is treated: one solution places this cap across all of Comcast's tiers, while the other carries the 300GB allotment for the Internet Essentials, Economy, and Performance tier and higher allotments for faster tiers above that.

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Earthlink this week strengthened its cloud services offerings, debuting a hosted desktop solution that allows customers access regardless of device and via both the Internet and secure MPLS connections. Over 250 applications are supported, and customers may also install their own custom applications.

Since the middle of last year, EarthLink has been transforming its business from an ISP to cloud services provider. In July, the company promoted Brian Fink to executive vice president of managed and cloud services. Fink brought with him two decades of experience in managed services. Since then, the company has continued to make some high profile cloud hires, including the appointment Thursday of former Concentric Cloud president Michael Toplisek to vice president of IT services.

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If you're worried about data loss, turn to the cloud. That's what a new survey commissioned by CA suggests. Fifty-five percent of all US businesses expect usage of the cloud to increase to meet continuity objectives. That's an important statistic considering every one of the 300 businesses participating in the study experienced some type of data loss event in the past year.

Among the most common reasons for data loss are IT system failures (76 percent); human error (41 percent); and external threats and attacks (35 percent). An earlier CA study suggests that data loss events cost companies an average $160,000 every year.

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You've heard of Platform-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service; maybe even Gaming-as-a-Service, too, from BetaNews' reporting on Tuesday. Get ready for the latest X-as-a-Service, thanks to a new Commerce-as-a-Service (CaaS) initiative from NetSuite.

The company debuted the initiative on Wednesday, saying CaaS will help partners manage both business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions regardless of device.

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GPUs first revolutionized visual computing, and now may revolutionize cloud computing as well. Nvidia introduced its GPUs for the cloud Tuesday at the annual GPU Technology Conference, an innovation it calls the third important milestone for the industry since the introduction of the GPU in 1993.

Nvidia's cloud GPUs are based on the company's Kepler architecture and has been in development for the past five years. The virtualization capabilities of Kepler make it ideal for use in large datacenters, and allows it to be shared by multiple users at the same time. Lag is reduced by built-in streaming capabilities, and Nvidia claims power efficiency and processing density enhancements will keep costs down.

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Red Hat celebrated the 10th anniversary of its flagship Enterprise Linux product, but reaffirmed the decision to shift focus to cloud computing, pledging that open-source roots would be key to success in the new business venture.

The company plans to release Enterprise Linux 7 in in late 2013, but offered little during a Tuesday press conference on what to expect. What may play a large part in the new release is a focus on the cloud. For all intents and purposes, Red Hat believes Linux is in the past and the cloud is the future.

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Less than a week after announcing a major Desktop-as-a-Service product in Simplified DaaS, Dell said Tuesday it would offer methods to securely sync sensitive data across disparate cloud services. Called Integration Packs, Dell initially is offering synchronization services between Salesforce CRM and the software version of QuickBooks.

An integration pack for synchronization between the online version of QuickBooks and Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce CRM is due in June. All three packs have a $65 monthly service charge, Dell says.

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VMware is known for its work in virtualization. The company aims to change that, and announced on Tuesday a new product to assist in the automation, deployment and management of complex applications on its cloud infrastructure. vFabric Suite 5.1 is a new product that takes code acquired through VMware's acquisition of SpringSource and adds additional functionality to make it more attractive to developers.

Application deployment automation, PostgreSQL and SQLFire support, and enterprise support have been added to the SpringSource code. VMware says that the service will help provide developers with the core application services they need to run Java Spring applications either on-site or in the cloud.

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SAP aims to show that it is a serious player in the cloud computing sector today, announcing several new cloud initiatives under what it calls an "accelerated" strategy. The company's deeper commitment to the cloud stems from its $3.4 billion merger with human capital management service provider SuccessFactors several months back.

Former SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard is now head of SAP's cloud unit, and he is tasked with turning the company's cloud business around. At the Sapphire Now Conference -- SAP's annual gathering in Orlando -- Dalgaard is showing off a line of solutions arranged around four different themes: people, money, customers and suppliers.

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The tech blogosphere is abuzz today following a report by Apple news site 9to5Mac claiming "trusted sources" say Google Maps will get the boot in iOS 6, replaced by an in-house solution. It is no secret these two companies have an increasingly strained relationship, and Apple's acquisitions point towards a future in maps.

In the newsroom this afternoon, we chalked this one up to "sourced conjecture": that is, while 9to5Mac may indeed have some kind of inside track to what Apple plans in the next version of iOS, it certainly doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this one out. The writing's been on the wall on this one for three years, at least.

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Google has set fees for its cloud SQL storage offering, and detailed pricing on both a per-use and per-day model depending on the developer's need. The move is an effort to bolster App Engine, which is a service from Google that allows developers to run cloud applications on the company's infrastructure.

The Mountain View, Calif. company has offered Cloud SQL in a limited free beta since last October. Developers can continue to use Cloud SQL free of charge until June 12, however, after that continued use will require billing information.

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Today, HP made OpenStack available in public beta, announcing general availability of three services to customers: Cloud Compute, Cloud Object Storage and Cloud Content Delivery Network; they're available on a pay-as-you-go basis.

In September, the Palo Alto, Calif. company started offering the services to a limited number of customers. HP's move can also be viewed as a strengthened commitment to OpenStack itself. Competitor Citrix is going the opposite direction -- last month relinquishing to open source CloudStack code received as part of the acquisition of Cloud.com last year.

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Dell continued to expand outside of its traditional PC-based business this week, making two separate announcements that symbolize a larger emphasis on services -- especially for the cloud. The Allen, Texas based company has introduced a Desktop-as-a-Service offering through a partnership with Desktone, as well as a new offering aimed at moving their SAP solutions to the cloud.

The moves signal a bigger business shift for a company that for most of its 26-year history has focused on physical hardware. At the same time, it's a sign of the times in enterprise environments, a move towards virtualization and cloud-based services.

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