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This week, we explore the paradox of cloud computing for IT pros, why the cloud actually isn't a threat to IT jobs and the real reason PaaS lags behind other forms of cloud computing.

VMware shocked the world this morning when it announced it was buying AirWatch for $1.54 billion. I spoke to a bevy of mobile experts including Brian Katz, Benjamin Robbins, R "Ray" Wang and Chris Hazelton about the purchase and why VMware made this move right now.

Every company and individual joins an open source project for any number of reasons. Some are altruistic, but many times it's about about a business agenda. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it can lead to tension and a need to build a consensus on the future of the community.

Android has more than 80 percent worldwide mobile marketshare, so it makes sense it would see the desktop as the next logical target, but just because they want to do it doesn't mean the market is looking to have an all-Android experience. Google also has to be very careful it doesn't end up damaging their growing ChromeOS business.

This week, five cloud myths, the real reason behind the Dropbox outage and IBM makes a billion dollar bet on Watson in the cloud.

When we think of cloud and mobile, we tend to think of our computers, tablets and smartphones, but the next great cloud-mobile battleground won't be any of those. It will be in your car, a device that might not be portable, but surely is mobile.

In the wake of NSA spying revelations, privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has seen its traffic numbers soar.

Recent data from IBM proved once again that iOS users were much more active during the holiday shopping season than their Android counterparts. It's unclear why this is the case, but I wondered if this kind of activity also translated to business use. Here's what I found.

In an article on cloud myths one big one was the notion that it's just for geeks. I would say it's just the opposite. In fact, the cloud has been the great equalizer giving ordinary users easy access to services that used to require help from IT.

New year. New blog. New feature. This week we look at cloud as the most disruptive force ever, a history of SaaS and the 10 worst outages of 2013.

You may wonder why Google decided to give Android away when they could make so much money charging even a modest amount per phone. I think it's because they knew they were two years behind Apple when they launched Android. They knew they needed to grow quickly and free scales rapidly. And it worked, probably better than they ever imagined.

NPD released some Chromebook sales numbers recently and it started a debate about whether Chromebook sales were hurting Apple or Microsoft more --or even if it was accurate data. But regardless, it's not a zero sum game. I buy different devices for different jobs, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

OpenStack is still a young project at three years old, and it's experiencing some growing pains. Those issues could represent a real opportunity to start a business built around OpenStack support.

When Oracle finally joined the OpenStack party last week, it raised a few eyebrows as people questioned their motives, but it could be nothing more than Oracle recognizing a trend it couldn't ignore any longer.

This week, we look at why the president can't give up his BlackBerry, a mistake you should never make with Hadoop and why some CIOs continue to support their company's cloud initiatives in spite of NSA surveillance revelations.

Microsoft has to evolve beyond the Windows 95 Start button and develop a coherent OS strategy. While Windows 8 as currently designed might not be the best or only answer, the idea of presenting one view across three screens is definitely the vision they should be pursuing --and they have to drag their whining users kicking and screaming with them into the future.

It's always difficult to separate marketing drivel from reality when making a technology purchase and databases are no different. That's why a site called DB-Engines, which ranks each database vendor according to a set of pre-defined metrics could be a useful resource for you when you make a database choice. And it's worth noting there are a mix of open source and proprietary choices.

Google entered the cloud infrastructure business this week, but they joined a crowded field. Just because they're Google doesn't guarantee success. They will have to earn their customers just like every other vendor in the space. But worth mentioning it does allow you to use any out of the box version of Linux for an OS.

The cloud and big data are a natural match as the cloud provides elastic resources for varying amounts of data processing, so it should come as no surprise that Amazon, Salesforce.com and IBM all made announcements about cloud Big Data products recently.

I know. I know. We've been hearing about the benefits of Big Data for several years and yet few but the largest companies have taken advantage. Perhaps the cloud could change that, putting big data processing within reach of most organizations and ushering in a new wrinkle: real-time decision making.