What if you could edit business documents stored on the cloud using the apps on your mobile devices? OneCloud, a new cloud-based service by online storage provider Box, was built to to do just that.

Making its debut this week, OneCloud is touted as the first enterprise mobile framework to bring together your mobile content and productivity apps. What this means is that you can host your Word documents on Box, edit the files using, say, Quickoffice on an iPad, and save them back to the Box cloud. …

Dubbed BizCloud, the service lets companies install a preconfigured private cloud on their own premises using virtualisation software from VMware, networking, security and computing gear from Cisco, as well as storage, security and management technologies from EMC.

These building blocks, which form the Virtual Computing Environment’s (VCE) vBlock infrastructure platform, are used by CSC’s own data centres. That means enterprises can also opt for a hybrid cloud by keeping core business applications on premise with BizCloud, and use CSC’s public cloud for disaster recovery or set up test environments.

With BizCloud, CSC says it “has taken the work out of implementing a private cloud and overcome the objections that security conscious organisations usually raise around cloud adoption”. It also claims that businesses can get their private clouds up and running in just 10 weeks. …

Our insatiable demand for cloud computing services may have created a data centre boom, but cloud service providers and enterprises are still figuring out ways to build cheaper and more efficient data centres.

Indeed, the rising cost of power, cooling equipment and other data centre facilities has been plaguing the IT industry for years. According to Gartner, an average of US$8 million a year is spent on manual IT operations such as installing server updates. Additionally, the tons of energy needed to power the servers and keep the lights can cost companies up to US$29 million over three years. …

In the first of this new series, we interviewed Cameron Purdy, vice president for development at Oracle, to hear his views on the company’s new WebLogic Server 12c, an application server designed to help enterprises move their applications to the cloud.

The software supports the latest Java standards including Java Standard Edition version 7 and is the first to comply with the full Java Enterprise Edition 6 platform profile. …

SAP beefed up its cloud applications portfolio this week with the global launch of SAP Business One OnDemand. The announcement follows its earlier acquisition of SuccessFactors, a cloud-based software for managing employee performance.

In a media statement Tuesday, the German software giant said BusinessOne OnDemand is planned for availability in 18 countries, including Australia, China, France, Germany, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

SAP intends to provide Business One OnDemand through partners that will offer the cloud-based software for a monthly subscription fee. It’s odd that SAP is only announcing Business One OnDemand now, as the software has been available through SingTel’s PowerON cloud service since August 2011. …

Just yesterday, Google announced Google Play, a one-stop portal consolidating the Android application store, Google e-book service, Google movies store and Google music store in one place.

Some pundits may have panned it as just a marketing name change, but I think it definitely signals Google’s ambition. They have ratcheted up their rhetoric vs. Apple.

For Singapore, only the paid Android app market is available under Google Play for now. The rest of the services are available mainly only in the US, UK and Canada, and will be rolled out worldwide in the coming months.

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Singapore’s red-hot data centre industry has just received a shot in the arm when Savvis announced plans to build its second data centre in Jurong East.

According to a media statement Thursday, the IT infrastructure services provider will be investing S$100 million in the new 53,000-square-foot facility, located 17 kilometres west of Savvis’ existing data centre.

Construction of the new data centre, dubbed SG2, starts in March and is expected to be completed in September 2012. A full suite of colocation, managed hosting, cloud computing and network services will be offered through the new data centre, which will meet strict banking and financial regulations for data centre facilities. …

When the going gets tough, business will often cast their eyes on the next big thing to boost the bottomline.

The current hype in IT happens to be cloud computing, with nearly every player — telcos, data centre providers, software makers and IT consultants — jostling for a slice of the pie.

It almost seems like a gold rush, except we’re dealing with services powered by electrons that traverse fibre cables at the speed of light.

This week, web hosting companies, a segment of the IT industry whose margins are known to be razor-thin, gathered in Florida to hear about Parallel’s delivery platforms that promise to help them different themselves from the pack. …

If Parallel’s founder Serguei Beloussov gets his way, the technology landscape in 2022 will be dominated by mobile and social technologies, big data and the cloud.

People would interact through social networks in new ways, with 80 percent of Internet transactions taking place on ubiquitous smartphones. Mobile operators such as China Mobile may also drop per minute billing for voice calls, in favour of mobile data plans. …

According to Parallels’ SMB Cloud Insights report, SMBs will continue to lead the cloud computing wave, with small businesses three times more likely than large enterprises to choose cloud services over on-premise software. …