Filtering the informative, insightful and quirky from the fire hose of cloud-based hype.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger provides some great insight into The Complex Transition to the Cloud, sharing his views on the slow adoption of cloud computing in organizations. “…a prediction by the research firm Gartner that while cloud computing will continue to grow at almost 20 percent a year, it will account for less than 5 percent of totally IT spending in 2015.” With a more positive mindset, Balaji Viswanathan highlights 7 Salient Trends and Directions in Cloud Computing that could be shaping the industry over the next few years.

Cloud computing also looks to save energy “A small business with 100 users that moved the Microsoft applications to the cloud could cut energy use and carbon emissions by 90%. Large organizations with 10,000 users saw a 30% reduction.” More on that story here.

The expansion of Windows Azure has been in the news with the announcement of “East US” and “West US” datacenters; this was covered by Visual Studio Magazine and Mary-Jo, and according to thenextweb.com Microsoft are also building $112 million data center in Wyoming.

The cloud price war is still in full swing with Joe Panettieri discussing the pricing of Windows Azure and Office 365 and asking How Low Can It Go?