Microsoft today opened a S$23 million technology centre in Singapore to enable companies to test out new technologies such as cloud computing and unified communications before rolling them out at their own premises.

The first in Southeast Asia, the centre joins another 26 worldwide in showcasing and concept-proofing the software giant’s new offerings to corporate customers.  …

The Asia-Pacific region appears more keen to adopt cloud computing than Europe and the United States, according to a survey of industry leaders revealed by HP today.

Fifty-eight per cent of chief information and technology officers in China have plans to move to cloud computing, while 56 per cent of these key decision makers are keen on the new technology in India, it said. This compares with 34 per cent in the United States and 32 per cent in Europe, according to HP executives at a regional media event in Singapore.

The reason: Asia has fewer legacy systems and thus can move faster without worrying about junking old investments. …

Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises: …

The growing rivalry between Salesforce.com and Oracle reached a pinnacle this week when Oracle reportedly canned a Salesforce.com keynote at its annual confab.

In a statement today, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Oracle cancelled his Wednesday morning address (U.S. time) at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 held in San Franciso’s Moscone Center. Instead, Benioff will organize a separate session at a nearby restaurant. …

Salesforce has unveiled a slew of new tools and services to lure developers to its cloud-based platform.

Leading the pack is Database.com, a cloud database that can power apps built for Android and iOS-based devices. These apps can be hosted on Salesforce’s own Force.com or other cloud-based platforms including Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure.

Database.com can also be used to run social media applications using a social data model that holds and manages data for social feeds, user profiles and status updates. Developers can specify followers for database records or request data feeds to display real-time data updates through social APIs. …

Salesforce.com is deepening the social connections that underpin its suite of cloud computing products.

Starting this October, its customer relationship management (CRM) customers will be able to see social profiles of customers with data mined from social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise social networking tool available for almost two years now, will also support instant messaging for the first time.

This means Chatter users will soon be able to chat with fellow workers, share screens, collaborate with partners and approve requests directly from their Chatter feeds. …

Yesterday was not a regular day for the Internet. When I tried to check my tweets in the morning, I found that Hootsuite, the browser-based social media management tool, was down. Oh well, I thought, maybe Reddit will get me some interesting links instead. But to my horror, it was suffering from an outage as well.

Then came the straw that broke the camel’s back and convinced me that something, somewhere is terribly wrong: I couldn’t check in to anywhere on Foursquare!

It turned out to be an issue with Amazon EC2, a cheap and scalable cloud service that many, many websites and services depend on for their hosting. On top of the above-mentioned Hootsuite, Reddit, and Foursquare, other sites affected include Q&A site Quora, location-based mobile game SCVNGR, iPad music app Discovr, social media monitoring app Wildfire, and more. …

The cloud infrastructure market in Singapore and the Asia Pacific region is heating up.

Savvis, a primarily US-based IT-services company that is looking to aggressively expand in Asia Pacific, is set to launch their virtual private data centre solution (VPDC) next month here in Singapore.

In a regional Asia Pacific market crowded with cloud infrastructure players — like new player Tata, commodity cloud incumbent Amazon, and IT behemoth IBM out of several others — what makes Savvis’ new Symphony VPDC play stand out?

Bryan Doerr, CTO of Savvis, pointed out two key points at the Asia Pacific Savvis Symphony VPDC media press luncheon this week: Security, and performance.

Savvis’ target audience is the enterprise customer, which Bryan defines as corporations who make “revenues of 200 million and upwards”. In other words, players like Amazon and Tata are not really full-on competitors, as their solutions attract the SMB and mid-sized crowd.

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With the cloud computing paradigm showing no signs of stopping, big IT vendors like HP, IBM and Oracle are clamoring to provide lucrative end-to-end cloud computing solutions for enterprise customers.

The one who wins these big solutions are often the ones with the best customer relationships and partner ecosystems. For HP in Singapore, they are setting their sights on three industries: digital media, government and finance.

So said Kelly Tan, vice president and managing director at HP Singapore, at last Friday’s HP cloud strategy sharing session with the Singapore media.

Piggybacking on their strong channels in these verticals, HP is going to target these industries with AP4SaaS, a cloud platform that is new to Singapore. AP4SaaS is a cloud platform where enterprise customers can share their ecosystems with other similar enterprises in the same verticals globally.

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Oracle became the latest major IT vendor to tap into the red-hot enterprise cloud computing market today when it unveiled its Exalogic Elastic Cloud today at its annual Oracle Openworld technology confab.

Targeted at large companies who wish to build their own “private clouds“, Exalogic is touted as a “compute cloud-in-a-box” product that includes a combination of servers, storage and networking components melded into a single machine.

“It includes all the hardware you need to run your applications, including 30 servers, infiniband networking that lets servers talk to one another and a high availability storage device,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at the show’s opening keynote today. “It also has all the middleware you need to develop and run all your applications.”

Essentially, what Oracle has done is to make it easier for enterprises to set up virtualised data centres where IT resources can be dynamically deployed based on business needs with the help of virtualization technology. Oracle is employing Java VM in Exalogic, where applications can run on Linux or Solaris virtual machines.

The usual cloud computing characteristics apply to Exalogic: dynamic load balancing, failover using Oracle Coherence and the ability to add, remove or migrate virtual machines on the fly.

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