According to CIO magazine the Telegraph Media Group is moving the accounting for its media sales group to FinancialForce.com, a cloud based accounting service.

This is the Telegraph's second foray into the cloud. They moved from Microsoft Office and Exchange to Google Apps in 2008.

Invoices for the media sales group will be created by FinancialForce.com which will then update the Telegraph Group's main ERP systems, Agresso.

There are also plans to integrate FinancialForce.com with the Salesforce.com cloud platform used by the media sales department.

A recent survey of 110 IT executives from large companies indicates virtualisation projects top the corporate priority lists for 2010.

This is supported by a recent Gartner report that shows the number 1 technology priority is virtualisation, with cloud computing in second place.

This is predicted to drive demand for contractors and permanent staff with virtualisation skills.

Research from Sterling Commerce suggests that over 75% of major European organisations are planning some form of cloud based B2B integration in 2010.

The research is based on interviews with 300 senior IT executives in France Germany and the UK.

Over 50% of respondents stated that cost reduction and predictability are the main drivers. However, they continue to be concerned with security issues around cloud computing.

Since Christmas an increase in response times have been detected from Amazon's EC2 service by Cloudkick, a cloud performance monitoring company.

An average ping latency of 50ms is relatively low and normal. However, Cloudkick has been measuring latencies of up to 1000ms since the 22nd December.

Global IT spending by financial services firms is set to reach $357.4 billion in 2010, an increase of 2.9% over 2009, according to research from Celent.

Firms in Europe account for 36% of the overall figure.

Maintenance continues to be the largest area of expenditure, accounting for a massive 72.7% of total IT spend in 2008 although this figure is predicted to fall to 70% in 2012.

The Y2K bug strikes again as legacy software struggles to handle the changeover to 1 January 2010.

Some experts are convinced the problems are due to quick fixes in the run up to 2000 which made any two-digit date less than 10 a date in the 2000s, while anything greater than 10 was pushed back into the 1900s.

Reported cases are:

A recent survey of 3,000 IT executives finds IT budget cuts had harmed innovation had stopped organisations winning new business.

Around 53% of CIOs said they didn't understand cloud computing or see how it could save them money. This corroborates another piece of research Majority of European IT Heads Unaware of Cloud Computing.

The survey was carried out by Datamonitor on behalf of BT Global Services.

According to a recent survey by Rainstor, 85% of companies embracing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications want to keep a copy of their data outside of their SaaS vendor's offering.

Although Rainstor is a commercial provider of data repository services, their findings do raise an interesting contractual question: In the event of a dispute with a cloud service provider, how do I get my data back in its entirety?

This issue needs to be included in any commercial agreement relating to cloud services, perhapsusing 3rd party 'data escrow' services.

New project planning software and an online service claim to make project management a lot easier, efficient and accessible.

ProjectPlan.com

Project Plan .com is innovative new project planning software that aims to give you a smarter way to plan projects than with Microsoft Project, but at a fraction of the price.

The average desktop/monitor combination consumes  up to 2000 kilowatt-hours (kWh)of electricity per year, of which 500 to 1000 kWh can be cut with simple power management.

According to a recent report the UK wastes £123m per year powering PCs out of hours. Each PC costs around £37 a year to run, but if you simply turn them off over night and at the weekend they cost just a £10 a year to run.

A desktop PC left on for 24 hours per day will create around 2,161lb of CO2 in a year.