Apple went on a fishing expedition and caught Microsoft’s data center general manager Kevin Timmons, who had been serving Microsoft for only a year-and-a-half. Microsoft in its turn picked up Timmons from Yahoo! where he served the company for 13 years. Considering that Timmons helped Microsoft build an energy efficient infrastructure beneath Microsoft’s cloud and online services at the firm’s then newly-created data center division, Apple chose him for a similar role.

“Kevin Timmons, general manager of Datacenter Services, has decided to pursue other career opportunities and is no longer working at Microsoft,” Dayne Sampson, CVP of Global Foundation Services for Microsoft, said in a statement. “We appreciate the contributions he made to Microsoft during his time here.”

At Microsoft, Timmons was pretty busy with his job as Microsoft launched this week its Cloud ERP solution with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and committing to releasing in the near future of Microsoft Dynamics ERP solutions, Dynamics AX, GP, NAV and SL running on the Windows Azure platform, allowing customers to relocate their systems to the cloud without the help of third party vendors and service providers.

Jefferies & Co. analyst Peter Misek said at the beginning of this week that is expecting Apple to open its data centers in North Carolina in the near future and there is evidence indicating that the company will extend them to Europe and other parts of the US.

“We believe Apple is about to launch a new video-focused cloud-based service. In addition to subscription revenues, we think Apple could potentially benefit from a halo effect that increases units and average selling prices for its existing products and provides a foundation for the launch of an iTV-like device,” Mr. Misek wrote.

On its careers website, Apple looks for a software engineer for “the future of cloud services at Apple(…)writing the software [that] forms the foundation for some of our most exciting new products and services.” Moreover, last week, Apple ordered 12 petabytes from EMC’s Isilon Systems for the storage of video downloads of iTunes customers. This should be enough to convince us that Apple is fully engaged with the cloud business.

Moving an executive from one company to another always involves a certain degree of risk, as earlier this week Huawei and Motorola reached an agreement on their proprietary data conflict. Huawei tried to prevent Motorola from transferring its manpower to Nokia Siemens, arguing this would involve the sharing of Huawei trade secrets to Nokia Siemens. This is a case closely resembling the Mark Hurd saga who left HP for Oracle. The bumpy relationship ended up with HP suing Hurd for sharing the company’s secrets with main competitor Oracle.