Cloud services are penetrating the smallest and largest constituents of the retail community alike. As proof, one of the widespread retail companies in the United States, Target taps Microsoft’s Hyper V software for virtualization solutions. This Microsoft property will be positioned in all 1755 stores of Target.

Vice president of Target Technology Services, Jeff Mader strongly approves the deal and is very optimistic about the outcome. He said, “Target’s investment in Hyper-V is a result of the strong technology partnership between our two companies. With Hyper-V, Target can reduce our stores’ server footprints without sacrificing the mission-critical application performance that contributes to a superior retail experience for our guests.”

VMware, virtualization software that runs on Microsoft Windows will also be indirectly involved in this partnership. The organization, like Microsoft, has visited the new frontier within the first few months of 2011. VMware launched vCenter Operations—a new cloud solution with strong interoperability of computing assets, capacity and configurations. They are also delving into the tablet craze in the market and pitched into iPad with “VMware View”.

Aside from deployment onto the several outlets of Target, Microsoft is also busy prepping up its System Center IT infrastructure and server management suite to efficiently manage machines in the cloud. The company is presently hosting the Microsoft Management Summit 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. With Microsoft’s private cloud in focus of the event, speeches from its top executives will be much awaited.

Bill Gates’ company has been quite visible in the headlines recently, wowing the tech community as it managed to be at the offensive side, kicking out E-Mail Spam Botnet. Before introducing the final version of Internet Explorer 9, it tracked the reasons of Internet Explorer 6’s demise.

With Microsoft exploring the retail business thanks to Target, the huge potential in this field is perhaps will be a big thing for cloud services and providers. The scope of these companies alone is enormous and far-reaching.