Salesforce.com have announced that they have entered into an agreement to acquire Heroku, the fastest growing cloud platform for writing Ruby-based applications.

A recent study by Accenture entitled "The Environmental Benefits of Moving to the Cloud" concludes that large organisations can reduce carbon emissions by 30% and smaller companies can achieve reductions of up to 90% by migrating to cloud services.

Fujitsu and Microsoft finalise their agreement on cloud computing services with initial rollout in 2011.

The plan is that Fujitsu will create cloud services for customers in the UK using Microsoft's Azure platform.

Dell has announced a deal to buy cloud-computing company Boomi after recently losing out to Hewlett-Packard for cloud firm 3Par.

Story: Dell reaches for the clouds with Boomi deal

Authored by Amazon's Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions and released in September 2010.

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Experts forecast a rise in demand for cloud services from SME's (Small to Medium Enterprises).

Speakers at this week's 360IT event in London predict that existing SME's will buy cloud services rather than hire additional IT support staff for new projects, whilst startups will do most things in the cloud.

This will put pressure on traditional outsourcing as a means of reducing the cost of IT, although security and lack of standards will limit potential in the short term.

Source: Computer Weekly

Skandia has awarded Logica a three year, £12.5 million, contract to provide private cloud-based infrastructure.

The solution provides capacity on demand and also reduces Skandia’s carbon footprint.

Netsuite suffered a 30 minute service outage on the 27th April preventing access to its cloud-based applications to customers worldwide.

The Netsuite service has been highly reliable in the past but with growing customer numbers there is a question mark overwhether the company provided sufficient information about the outage.

The outage is reported to have been caused by network issues and Netsuite is still investigating.

easyJet has signed a multi-year subscription to use Proofpoint's cloud-based email security solution, Proofpoint ENTERPRISEâ„¢.

Proofpoint's SaaS (Software as a Service)solution will provide protection from spam, viruses, phishing attacks and other email-borne threats.