Hewlett-Packard is considering spinning off its PC business, is dumping webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad, and has acquired Autonomy Corporation for $10.3 billion

UPDATED:  Research has found that the majority of NZ businesses surveyed believe cloud computing is relevant to them.

There’s 100 different arguments about how it should be defined, but there’s no doubt cloud computing is suddenly trendy.

And options are suddenly proliferating for New Zealand businesses. Local players like Iconz and Orcon are offering cloud services.

Amazon recently launched an Asia Pacific cloud service centred around a data centre in Singapore.

And last week, so did Microsoft (read NBR’s report here).

Yesterday, Microsoft New Zealand officially launched Azure, a new “cloud” version of Windows, tackling tricky price and trust issues head on.

Under a cloud setup, your software, and your data, is hosted not within your own network but at a data centre in the cloud (that is, accessed via the internet; in this case, one run by Microsoft in the US or Singapore). You can rent computing power, and storage – or ditch it – as required.

The Ministry of Economic Development has invited proposals for the supply of an electronic marketplace (or “e-marketplace”) solution under that would work under a “software-as-a-service” (“SaaS”) delivery model.

SaaS - a close relative to cloud computing - involves software and a service that sits on the internet and is accessible from any PC.