Fresh off the acquisition of a company that specializes in helping customers manage resources across multiple public clouds, Dell said it is "refining" its own plans to build a public cloud based on OpenStack.

Dell has purchased Enstratius, a company that allows customers to manage cloud resources across multiple providers from a single management console for an undisclosed sum this week.

The latest version of Debian -- Version 7.0, codenamed "Wheezy" -- is now in stable release, bringing with it accessibility enhancements, a new version of the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment and support for multiple hardware architectures.

Cloud scaling will be all the switching rage at this week’s Interop. Three major vendors last week took their platforms deeper into and then beyond the data center, outdueling each other on server access density and software programmability, two key attributes needed for the virtualized goldmine called the cloud. And in so doing, they have raised the bar and perhaps set the stage for one of the more anticipated announcements in SDN switching from Cisco spin-in Insieme.

Brocade this week extended its data center networking portfolio with hardware and software enhancements designed to better integrate and align physical and virtual resources.

About three years ago Embotics jumped into developing support in its private cloud management platform for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor, hopeful that the VMware virtualization challenger would take off. When that takeoff initially stalled, Embotics curtailed its Hyper-V work to focus resources elsewhere.

Amazon Web Services is attempting to distance itself from other cloud providers by enhancing its services to incorporate the differentiating features of its competitors.

Google earlier this month made a significant Cloud announcement, opening up its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to customers and removing the beta tag from the service.

Who is Amazon's biggest competitor in the cloud?

IBM's decision this week to base its cloud services on OpenStack may help establish this open source platform as the standard in enterprises.

It wouldn't be a mischaracterization to equate the cloud computing industry to the wild, wild west.

The time for dabbling in cloud computing is over, say industry analysts. 2013 is the year that companies need to implement a hybrid cloud strategy that puts select workloads in the public cloud and keeps others in-house.