If you’ve ever thought of running Android apps on a PC, there’s now an easy way to do it.

Bluestacks, a company headed by former McAfee executives, has developed a virtualisation software that offers a full Android environment on other computing platforms. The technology is similar to that of Parallels Desktop for Mac, which lets you run the Windows on a Mac computer.

Bluestacks is currently available as an alpha release for Windows, though its multi-OS virtualisation technology can support Android on Chrome OS, as well as Windows systems powered by ARM processors. A Mac version of Bluestacks is also in the works.

I took Bluestacks for a spin and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to run Android apps on a Windows 7 machine. After installing the software, a process that took less than 5 minutes on my four-year-old notebook, you will see a desktop widget on screen.

Clicking on the widget opens a list of pre-installed apps like Talking Tom 2, Bloomberg and Drag Racing. You can add more apps from Bluestacks’ limited repository, or send the apps that you have on your Android device to the PC by installing the Bluestacks Cloud Connect Android app. This effectively means you can’t use Bluestacks without an Android device – unless you’re perfectly happy with the Bluestacks apps.

All apps will run in full screen. You can control the apps with the keyboard and mouse in place of taps and swipes. Clicking on an ad within an app will take you to the advertiser’s website displayed in the standard Android browser.

I didn’t notice any performance issues, though some apps such as Bubble Buster did run a little slower than on a mobile device. Not all apps will work out of the box. Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja, for example, can only run on a Pro version of Bluestacks that isn’t available yet.

Few technology vendors — if they have any ambitions — can ignore the cloud.

Customers demand it and vendors better have an answer.

Case in point software stack infrastructure player TIBCO, who today just announced the formal launch of TIBCO Silver, their suite of cloud-based solutions. The announcement was made at TUCON 2011, their big annual customer event held in Las Vegas.

According to Ivan Casanova, director of product marketing at TIBCO, TIBCO Silver is a “21st century solution” for private, hybrid and public clouds.

One of the offerings is TIBCO Silver Fabric, which allows a cloud administrator to easily manage a private or hybrid cloud deployment.

One example that TIBCO gave on how TIBCO Silver Fabric works is where compute servers are run in a public cloud – say, Amazon Web Services – but access to this is through the TIBCO Silver Fabric hosted on a private cloud.

Through a few clicks of the TIBCO Silver Fabric web-based interface, engineers can easily set-up software stacks – for example, an Apache web server with an Oracle database – and TIBCO Silver Fabric will automatically deploy the requisite compute resources necessary on the public cloud.

The proposition is that hybrid solutions like this is the best of both worlds as it leverages on the cost effectiveness of public clouds, but yet is secure and gives better performance.

To me it sounded very much like a virtualization type of technology. Ivan cautioned that TIBCO Silver Fabric wasn’t a hypervisor kind of solution however – which is virtualization at the OS level, where players like VMWare and Citrix play best in. One good way to think of TIBCO Silver Fabric is that it is virtualization at the application level.

Beyond TIBCO Silver Fabric, which caters to private clouds, TIBCO is also launching TIBCO Silver Marketplace, which is a public cloud offering. According to TIBCO, TIBCO Silver Marketplace is hosted by them in a secure, non-disclosed location.

For now, data sharing solution Formvine is the only SaaS (Software-as-a-service) available on the TIBCO Silver marketplace. Other parts of the TIBCO range of enterprise software, like business analytics tool Spotfire and customer engagement tool Loyalty Labs will be available soon, Ivan said.

Another part of the public cloud offering is TIBCO Silver Grid, which is a high performance compute grid kind of solution, where you can rent compute cycles.

It is really nascent times for TIBCO Silver, which is officially just a day old. It seems to me that TIBCO Silver was cobbled up in reaction to cloud requests from TIBCO’s customer base, and they are trying to leverage experiences they learnt to see if it will stick with other customers.

Whether it will all work out in the long run remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: The cloud is here to stay.

For the past year or so, many tech vendors — e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle — are jumping on and touting clouds as the next big thing. Now Cisco is taking up the banner charge and announcing their strategy and intent to attack this space.

At a telepresence media/analyst session held yesterday at Cisco offices in Asia and US, Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior and senior VP of the software group Doug Dennerline fielded questions on Cisco’s push into clouds.

Firstly, definitions. The over-hyped, fuzzy phrase “clouds” can mean wildly different things to different people, and I have gone off on rants before on what exactly do you mean when you talk about clouds. At least Cisco defined what exactly cloud computing means to them, and here’s their verbatim definition:

Cloud computing: IT resources and services that are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided on-demand and at-scale in a multi-tenant environment.

Sigh. Basically it’s virtualization in the data centre. Not surprising, if you think about Cisco’s recent aggressive pushes into this space. They added one more line that today’s clouds are “associated with an off-premise, hosted model”, but the suggestion is that it need not be. Well, if you ask me, take away this part of the definition and “cloud” as a term becomes very weak. Anyway, I digress.

So where in this space is Cisco playing at? They defined four categories in clouds, and here’s a diagram from them.

Basically, Cisco sees opportunity in three of these four tiers that they defined: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (aka creating a platform for a third party to sell their SaaS on your platform) and the underlying IT infrastructure, which is Cisco’s core bread and butter. The infrastructure as a service is an area they are not looking at; they’ll rely on partners to roll this out.

My take on this? Cisco isn’t saying much in specifics. Besides broad strokes that they are going to play in this space, many questions were unanswered, like how are they competing with software vendors on unified communications (UC)/collaboration products (are they in the first place? to what extent?), how to tweak Cisco’s channel partners programme for cloud so that it doesn’t cannibalize their on-prem businesses, etc.

But it does signal Cisco’s ambition. Cisco believes that enterprise customers will eventually outsource parts of their IT infrastructure to external clouds (reasons: economies of scale, commodity services, etc.), yet keep much infrastucture internally for security and control reasons. And being a network vendor that girds the infrastructure for many enterprises, they believe they are best placed to cobble up and federate external clouds with internal virtualized network solutions. Why let other vendors eat up so much of the IT infrastructure and services stack when you can do this?

Therein lies the danger. Simon Piff, program director of IDC for AP storage research, whom I met at the event, said: “Cisco will potentially alienate more partners with this.” He mentioned that they have already alienated many long time partners like HP, IBM and Dell by moving into the data centre with blades and commodity servers, and more will likely come with their push upwards into clouds and SaaS. Cisco’s ambition is definitely something the rest of the big technology players won’t discount and will watch out for.

But with big ambition comes big prizes as top dog, and Cisco has deep pockets. “You never know, maybe Cisco will emerge as the next IBM”, Simon said.