VMware has got a tick of approval from one market analyst for its fourth quarter financial performance last year and the take-up of its core product offerings, including cloud-based products and services, but its also predicted that the company wil face increasing competition for marketshare from IBM and Microsoft.

HP has revealed the timetable for the release of webOS under an open source licence. Open webOS 1.0 is scheduled to appear in September.

Microsoft has rolled out a number of changes to its Windows Azure platform, including a "truly free" 90-day trial plus new price caps on large databases.

HP has announced it will contribute the former Palm smartphone operating system, webOS, software to the open source community.

Australian managed services specialist, Virtual Ark, is using recently raised funding of $1.6 million to broaden the global market reach of its cloud application management platform, which is now available to companies in Australia as well as the US.

  SGI will ship server clusters with Cloudera's distribution of Apache Hadoop preinstalled.  

  OS X Lion 10.7.2 provides iCloud compatibility, assorted bug fixes and improvements, and a slew of security fixes. A corresponding security update is available for Snow Leopard 10.6.8.  

A vulnerability - more accurately, a possibly widespread misconfiguration - of the Apache reverse proxy can expose supposedly 'internal' systems.

The rapid release tempo recently adopted for Firefox is causing angst for enterprise users. A proposed 'slow track' may soothe those furrowed brows.

The Business Software Alliance is taking aim at small businesses in Perth. The move is set to go national.