Don't like your cloud vendor? Wait a second.

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If your cloud provider’s lineup leaves you cold, you can jump ship. Or you could wait a minute because things could — probably will — change. There’s already been a ton of consolidation — the acquisitions of MetaCloud, Eucalyptus, Cloudscaling et al by Cisco, HP, and EMC respectively.

And considerable partnering as well. This week’s news that [company]VMware[/company] and [company]Google[/company] are collaborating to bring key Google cloud services — including BigQuery — to VMware’s vCloud Air is just the latest –and most striking example.

Google potentially gets an entry point to VMware’s enterprise customers and vCloud Air gets more cool large-scale applications to bring in more customers. Depending on how this arrangement is executed it could give both players a better competitive story vis-a-vis [company]Amazon[/company] Web Services.

Speaking of which, the latter continued its push into business applications with AWS WorkMail. Seriously, yet another email product? Wasn’t this category supposed to be dead already?

We also hash out the tectonic shifts at [company]IBM[/company]. First, a key departure — that of Lance Crosby, former CEO of SoftLayer, the company IBM bought in mid 2012 for $2.2 billion. Crosby came over to drive IBM’s cloud strategy and then suddenly he wasn’t. And now he’s gone.

But there are other exits coming too as IBM launches another round of layoffs. They probably won’t amount to the 26 percent cuts reported (110,000 jobs!) but no one really knows how deep they’ll go so stay tuned.

On a cheerier note we hash out cool new business intelligence both from IBM and [company]Microsoft[/company]. And, in the run up to Structure Data, Derrick talks to Matt Ocko, co-managing partner of DataCollective, who has a good handle on what’s overdone, and what’s truly new-and-important in data. You’ll get a taste of what you’ll hear about at Structure Data in March. So give it a listen.