Separately, this week is seeing news of partnerships and products as equipment vendors continue to gear up for a cloud-computing future.
"We are seeing more interest in it, but we're not seeing as much adoption yet as the market is reporting," John Ross, CTO of cloud provider GreenPages Inc. , told ChannelWeb.
As with a lot of markets, cloud computing is being overestimated in its early days. The main disconnection is that large enterprises haven't joined the fun yet. Assuming they eventually do, the cloud computing growth forecasts have a chance.
Still, there's that hockey-stick curve being drawn by analysts. Gartner Inc. expects cloud computing to be a $150 billion market by 2013, up from $47 billion in 2008.
Those three companies have collaborated before, and they represent one of a few partnership combinations Cisco has in the cloud area. Cisco and VMware, along with EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), announced their Virtual Computing Environment in November, and Cisco and EMC have a joint venture called Acadia, which helps enterprises build out private clouds.
Extreme also announced the Summit X480, a fixed-configuration box with 48 ports running at up to 1 Gbit/s each. Both new products are due to ship this quarter.
Other recent items in the world of clouds and virtualization:
- Perfect Storm Threatens Telecom Networks
- Verizon Tempts Retailers With Managed Services
- Riverbed Updates Cascade
- Intelliden Offers Cloud Router Checks
- IBM Unveils BlackBerry Apps
- HP, Microsoft to Simplify IT
- COLT Adds Cloud Services
— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading