Cloud adoption is a growing trend on a global scale, and as demand explodes, many companies are jumping on this profitable bandwagon, further pushing innovation – and interesting news developments. The European Union has paid attention to all this, and as vendor lock-in concerns intensify with the emergence of newer and better providers, the EU has standardized the cloud.

Microsoft opened up a new Cloud and Interoperability Center in Brussels alongside the EU’s new goal of achieving cloud support standardization, aimed to allow enterprises to move from one cloud service provider to another as easily as users do with mobile providers.

Vendor lock-in is one of the most prominent concerns circling the cloud in the enterprise space, but open-source software, which also happens to be more cost-efficient than proprietary alternatives, looks to solve all that. This is exactly why the open-source trend is one of the more notable ones in the cloud, and the reason the companies pushing the movement have been so active lately.

Hadapt launched – a start-up which bridges open source cloud management platform Hadoop with advanced database in order to allow the real time analysis of both structured and unstructured data.

Moreover, Cloud.com released version 2.2 of its open source multi-tenant IaaS platform, CloudStack, which features over 100 new functions. One of these features’ is CloudBridge, which lets you integrate CloudStack-based applications with other clouds including EC2, Scalable Storage Cloud (S3) and OpenStack. CloudStack 2.2 also includes hypervisor support for VMware vSphere.

The cloud is gaining a tremendous amount of momentum all over the globe, and all this demand is constantly spurring innovation. DotCloud, a startup which offers an offering resembling a PaaS / SaaS hybrid, raised $10 million in funding. When we look all the way up to the mount Olympus of the tech industry, we’ve also got some news from Hewlett-Packard. The company announced it will begin offering cloud services including infrastructure and software to its customers, adding Amazon and Google to the electronics giant’s competitors list.