In fact, many companies that are now household names have invested in cloud services to allow for computing capacity as an Internet service instead of providing it from a data centre.

Companies that have launched cloud services include Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon.

However, a new company is trying to break into the heavily occupied field of cloud services – Rackspace Hosting.

The company, which has been based in San Antonion, Texas, for the last nine years, has already managed to create a nice web presence in managed web hosting.

Lew Moorman, the chief strategy officer of Rackspace stated that the company is planning to use cloud computing services because they offer a cost-efficient solution to clients as they help streamline IT budgets for technological support.

This is not the only improvement that Rackspace has made recently, as last autumn it acquired Slicehost to provide a storage solution for the implementation of cloud computing and also partnered with Limelight to provide a suite for its cloud computing options.

While the acquisitions cost the company about $11.5 million, there apparently is a silver lining in cloud computing, as the new service allowed the company to recoup its expenditures within just the first quarter of 2009.

A large reason for Rackspace’s success has been attributed to its excellent customer service, which was highlighted in a recent Investors.com profile.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/061709_Rackspace_Interests_Investors_with_Cloud_St

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=479696

Total Care, says Frontpages, provides 24-hour hardware monitoring and alerting, and monthly reports on critical hardware thresholds, including disk space, CPU and memory.

The service also provides controlled patching, with critical security patches applied within 72 hours of release and standard patches within 14 days or as requested.

Through the promise of a fully managed solution, Total Care Support provides the customer with the sense of security they require, stated Rob LaMear, Frontpages president, in a press release.

Unsurprisingly, he predicts the enhanced management will allow customers to center their wherewithal on their core businesses, one of the hosting business’s most commonly repeated formula for success.

A Microsoft gold certified partner since January, Frontpages provides hosted applications including SharePoint, MOSS, Exchange, CRM, SQL Server, in conjunction with its more standard selection of dedicated server offerings.

The Frontpages announcement provided no particulars about the pricing of the new management services, but the company appears to be following the presently fashionable model of addressing its existing customer base by moving up the stack toward a more managed offering.

A beta of Hyper-V was included with Windows Server 2008 when it publicly launched last month at Microsoft’s largest enterprise product launch, Heroes Happen Here, but according to Microsoft’s announcement, “this release candidate provides updated, near-final code.”

It remains unverified whether this will be the final update to the software, but Microsoft says it is still on track to release the ultimate version this August.

Microsoft clarified in its press release that, “the release candidate features an expanded list of guest operating systems, which now includes Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3. Host server and language support has been expanded to include the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter, with English, German and Japanese language options available as well as enablement of Hyper-V on international locales.”

The release candidate additionally includes more support for hardware configurations and offers enhanced performance and scalability.

Microsoft also announced that it is working on deals with hardware vendors like AMD, Dell and IBM, that will contain its Hyper-V software come pre-installed and supported on their servers. This appears to be Microsoft’s method of catching up to VMware’s recent announcement of a comparable deal with leading hardware vendors, as reported by The Register last month.

Presenting at Microsoft’s MIX08 online technology conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, Ballmer echoed the validation of last month’s $41.2-billion spontaneous offer for Yahoo. In a question-and-answer period with Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist and previous Apple employee, he said the planned deal to acquire Yahoo would accelerate the company’s labors to gain competitive ground on Google.

If the deal really happens, Ballmer said that the two companies will work collectively to reduce any overlapping services.

“It won’t make sense to have two search services, two advertising services, two mail services, and we will have to sort some of that through,” said Ballmer, who also broached the company’s efforts to build a larger presence in the online services market.

Earlier this week, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced at the Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference 2008 it would commence the beta process for its Microsoft Online Services, offering hosted versions of applications such as Exchange and SharePoint directly to end users.

Conjecture also appeared last week that Microsoft is constructing out 24 data centers for an overall capacity of roughly 12 million square feet, as part of its rising strategy of offering hosted applications.

Based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the new online services will allow businesses to access email, calendaring, contacts, shared workspaces, and Web conferencing or video conferencing over the Web. The services are managed through a single Web-based interface, and IT professionals will be able to use it to scrutinize the performance of the services, add and configure users, submit and track support requests and manage users and licenses.

Gates stated “The combination of software plus services gives customers advanced choice and flexibility in how they access and manage software. With Microsoft Online Services, businesses can deploy software as a subscription service, from servers they manage on-site, or a combination of the two, depending on their specific needs. In the future, customers and partners should expect to see this kind of choice and flexibility for all of Microsoft’s software and server products.”

US-based companies can register for the restricted beta trial at mosbeta.com. The new services are planned to see a universal release in the second half of 2008, says the company.

During the event, Microsoft additionally launched Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express, a free, downloadable enterprise search product that combines straightforwardness with a authoritative set of search features. The company also launched Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint, which enables customers to combine Silverlight and SharePoint to build rich Internet applications.

Since gaining its initial certification from Microsoft in 2000, Balasai Net says it constantly built competencies and continued the development every year. This accomplishment shows that Balasai Net has attained the uppermost levels of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies.

Additionally the Web host achieved the Microsoft Advanced Infrastructure Solutions Competency, with an area of expertise in Hosting Solutions. This competency illustrates Balasai Net uses inventive and cost-effective infrastructure solutions. The company was one of two Indian providers to offer Windows 2008 based free hosting.

Balasai Net says it provides managed hosting and dedicated services for sophisticated and multifaceted requirements of hosting and Internet Infrastructure customers.

In what may possibly be noted as its most audacious acquisition move to date, Microsoft offered $31 per share for Yahoo, or a 62 percent premium over the Internet media company’s closing stock price on NASDAQ Thursday.

Yahoo, who said it would assess the bid, shares jumped to $30.75 in pre-market trading, while Microsoft shares, which have a market capitalization of about $300 billion, fell six percent to $30.78.

According to reports, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, says that after 18 months of talks with Yahoo, this bid marks “the next major milestone” for Microsoft and that he is very positive that this is the right course for both Yahoo and the software giant.

Conjecture over a Microsoft move on Yahoo has circulated for at least a year, as investors speculated whether the two would collaboration in opposition to a constantly more dominant Google.

Internet audience researcher comScore has estimated by that Google’s share of the worldwide Web search market has attained 77 percent, while Yahoo is second with 16 percent and Microsoft was a far-away third with 3.7 percent.