Intel Hybrid Cloud program offers your small business customers cloud-like flexibility, with the confidence of onsite hardware.

The Intel Hybrid Cloud program, featuring the Intel AppUp Small Business Service, enables you to provide customers with server software and services on a pay-as-you-go basis, along with the stability and confidence of on-premises hardware. You get a turnkey, remotely manageable cloud solution and your customers receive the benefits of cloud-based services combined with the responsiveness and security of local hardware.

The Intel AppUp Small Business Service, an innovative software delivery mechanism and catalog of small business applications, runs on the Intel Hybrid Cloud platform, which features a scalable, pre-configured server with robust remote management capabilities. The Intel Hybrid Cloud platform also includes the Intel Hybrid Cloud software, server, and management portal. The Intel AppUp Small Business Service enables you to deliver cloud-like benefits with flexibility, confidence and a better user experience for your small business customers. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that supports wide variety of Internet services and remote applications. It is similar to Amazon’s Web Services products to provide a virtual data center which includes everything from computational resources to database services to synchronization.
The back-end data centers are hosted by Microsoft and the platform offers both an API and a client-side managed class library for developers to utilize.

Microsoft is positioning its Windows Azure cloud service as a platform to provide back-end services for mobile devices, including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. More towards WP7.
The goal of Azure is to provide developers who want to write applications that run in a remote data center with a platform and set of tools.

These efforts are happening concurrently with Google’s attempt to do the same for Android and the Google App Engine cloud.