Cloud computing might be one of the latest buzz words in computing, but this method of computing isn’t all that new.

In the face of today's increased economic pressures, many IT organizations are turning to cloud computing to help reduce costs and improve efficiencies in the data center. Service providers play a key role in this data center transformation and help customers realize these benefits by delivering a wide range of IT services via the cloud.

Citrix Systems and Novell announce a collaboration that expands choice for customers through increased virtualisation interoperability and new assessment tools to help pinpoint the economically most advantageous approach to virtualisation. Through this new partnership, Novell has certified SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a “Perfect Guest” running on Citrix XenServer and both companies will provide joint technical support to customers.

Rackspace Hosting has launched Hosted MicroSoft SharePoint backed by Rackspace’s 24x7x365 Fanatical Support. With the addition of hosted Microsoft SharePoint, Rackspace's suite of cloud applications now includes business-class collaboration, e-mail and storage solutions.

CA and NetApp have announced an extension of their multi-year solutions partnership to develop management solutions for public and private cloud environments.

Microsoft continues its foray into unified communications (UC). With its support for a virtualised topology in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, it now supports virtualisation in several OCS R2 components including presence, IM and group chat.

If you’d told me earlier on in 2009 that cloud computing would be one of the hottest topics in communications and IT by the end of the year, I’m not sure I would have entirely believed you, writes Jim Warner, vice-president and head of digital media, advertising & cloud computing at TM Forum.

There are a number of good reasons why companies should virtualise their IT infrastructure – super fast disaster recovery, lower hardware acquisition costs, better hardware expenditure and reduced energy consumption to name but a few.

With South African companies becoming increasingly concerned about IT acquisition and energy costs, the demand for virtualisation technologies should grow steadily in 2010.

There’s a perception that virtualisation has almost eliminated the need for capacity planning. But, Herman van Heerden, Managing Director of Starship Systems, a local technology company specialising in the design, supply and deployment of virtualisation technologies, says this is a misconception.

It's been an article of faith that virtualisation will help save the enterprise money, turning it into one of the few growth areas in the recession. But some companies are starting to take a hard look at the numbers and are concluding that the ROI on virtualisation may not be all it's cracked up to be.

Citrix Systems has launched the new Citrix Ready Open Desktop Virtualisation programme to further accelerate large-scale enterprise virtual desktop deployments with Citrix XenDesktop.