In the past week, some  interesting cloud news has come from all directions, but especially from giants like IBM, EMC and Juniper Networks.  That’s no big surprise, but the early year seems a particularly important time to get initiatives off on the right foot, especially for EMC, which hosted a bi-continental event for its Big Data announcements and massive product launches. IBM, on the other hand, celebrated its centennial year, while the latter focused their attention on private, public and hybrid clouds and respectively on internal marketing services.

IBM keeps its hand in innovation and puts into effect plans of taking cloud computing to China. IBM signed a partnership with Range Technology Development for building a considerable cloud-computing data center in the Hebei province of China by the end of 2016, and refers to it as the largest in Asia. The data-center is devised as occupying 6.2 million square feet and meeting green building standards. IBM is committed to sustainable green initiatives as proved by its partnership with the Bank of China in London to embrace green principles, namely reducing the Bank of China’s paper consumption by 95 percent.

Speaking of expanding cloud computing initiatives, EMC focuses all its efforts in building private, public and hybrid clouds over a virtualized environment. According to company President and COO Pat Gelsinger, EMC tries “to help IT build clouds. We call those private clouds. We are also trying to take the same technologies to enable service providers. We call those public clouds. And we want to make them work together. We call that hybrid – some of this, some of that. And we’re finding that message resonates with IT.”  In order to meet the demands on big data analysis of businesses, EMC acquired Greenplum and Isilon, and invested $17 billion in internal research and development in the last five years.

Alongside the blooming EMC, we have Juniper Networks also making its way in the industry, as seen from Juniper’s earnings call of the last quarter of 2010. Kevin Johnson, Chief Executive Officer, stated that their ‘growth agenda is focused on two significant market trends: mobile Internet and cloud computing.’ It is also notable Juniper’s turn on providing clients with internal marketing solutions, namely the Continuing Education Program aimed at serving clients’ employees.