This week in big data had a few major updates, including the roll out of HP Cloud Services – the hardware giant’s big entry into IaaS – into public beta.

The platform is based on OpenStack, a now highly popular open-source cloud OS, and according to SiliconANGLE’s Matt Weinberger can credit a lot of its charm to the sheer react of the company that’s standing behind it. Regardless of the reason, what’s clear is that the community is ready to adopt it: a long list of companies announced integration and other kinds of support at launch, and we could expect that number to rise as Cloud Services gains momentum among users. The open beta is a big opportunity.

This week also had a couple of updates in the user virtualization space, where one VMware partner had a big milestone. Atlantis Computing makes software that compliments View (as well as Citrix’s XenDesktop) by eliminating the trouble that comes with storing user data, and the latest version of its solution simplifies things a bit more. The 3.2 releases introduces faster cloning, at approximately 5 seconds per image, and a number of other things.

AppSense in turn updated its User Virtualization Platform, and John Furrier took the opportunity to write up a piece about how the news reflect on the company and the rest of the market.

Last but not least is Samsung’s acquisition of  mSpot, an operator of a streaming service that gives users access to videos and other content from their mobile devices. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but it will certainly be interesting to see how the manufacturer will put the cloud service to use: will Samsung follow the footsteps of some competitors and include pre-installed offers?