The U.S. government has modernized telecom and supporting IT twice within the last 20 years -- but not without controversy, delays and costly project management. A third modernization currently is under way, under the direction of the federal GSA. The potential value of contracts issued to vendors under the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions program is $50 billion over 15 years.

Oracle's most recent financial report reveals some hints about its future. Oracle has posted some very impressive numbers as its cloud computing products and services have taken off, and the recent Q2 reporting is a fine reference point. From the company's Q2 announcement: Cloud SaaS revenues were up 55 percent; PaaS plus IaaS revenues were up 21 percent; total cloud revenues were up 44 percent.

Microsoft has launched a raft of new Kubernetes-related projects, demonstrating its growing commitment to the technology. Among them are a new version of its experimental Azure Container Instances for Kubernetes, the Virtual Kubelet. Microsoft also entered a collaboration with Heptio on a new disaster recovery solution. The Virtual Kubelet builds on Microsoft's earlier ACI announcement.

CoreOS on Tuesday announced the release of Tectonic 1.8, a Kubernetes container management platform. Tectonic enables enterprises to deploy key automation infrastructure components that function like managed cloud services without cloud vendor lock-in. The CoreOS Open Cloud Services Catalog offers an alternative to cloud vendors' proprietary services and APIs.

IBM has announced IBM Cloud Private, a software platform that allows enterprise customers to run applications and store critical data in an on-premises, private cloud environment. The new service employs a Kubernetes-based container architecture that supports both Docker containers and Cloud Foundry. IBM also introduced new container-optimized versions of core enterprise software.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation has launched Container Runtime as the default deployment and management platform for containers using Kubernetes and BOSH. The foundation announced Container Runtime at its annual European user conference. Cloud Foundry is an open source Platform as a Service offering used for building and managing applications in the cloud or in data centers.

Red Hat on Tuesday announced the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, a new platform that combines two existing systems for analytics and data management into a single offering. The new platform combines the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA into a single, consolidated platform.

Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of SQL Server 2017, now with support for Linux, at its Ignite conference in Orlando. The company first announced its plans for the newest iteration of its database software a year and a half ago. This is the first version of SQL Server to run on Windows Server, Linux and Docker, noted Scott Guthrie, EVP, cloud and enterprise, at Microsoft.

Microsoft on Friday announced completion of the Marea undersea cable, which stretches 4,400 miles between Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Bilbao, Spain. A joint project of Microsoft, Facebook and global telecommunication infrastructure company Telxius, the cable lies more than 17,000 feet below the ocean's surface. It is the first cable to link Virginia and Spain.

Oracle showed some very good numbers in its latest earnings report. As it begins its second year of aggressive cloud promotion, the company overall is showing significant year-over-year improvements, thanks to its turn to cloud infrastructure, applications and platforms. Yet when read right, the numbers announce the end of the beginning of the end as much as they announce the end of the beginning.

IBM has launched LinuxOne Emperor II, the second generation of its open source mainframe computer system. The new model has a layer of security and privacy not seen in a Linux-based platform before, the company said. "We saw in our success stories for Emperor that security was a recurring theme attracting new customers to the platform," noted Mark Figley, director of LinuxOne Offerings at IBM.

Federal agencies have begun using an emerging information technology tool to manage the huge amount of data the United States government generates and stores. Federal IT managers recently have embraced the concept of convergence, which has been gaining traction in the private sector. Agencies also have indicated that the approach may be useful for other federal IT applications.

Linux is now the dominant operating system on Amazon's AWS cloud service and is growing rapidly on Microsoft's Azure platform this year, according to a report on public cloud adoption trends Sumo Logic released on Tuesday. The company's second annual State of Modern Apps report reveals usage trends on AWS, Azure and Google clouds, and how they impact the use of modern apps in the enterprise.

Oracle will announce its Q1 revenue and profit numbers after market close on Wednesday. There's more than a little excitement about what might be revealed, specifically if the company can continue its rise, thanks to its cloud products. The anticipated answer is yes, but there's potential for a surprise. The company so far has been posting great numbers for its cloud products.

The enterprise SaaS market grew 31 percent year over year, totaling almost $15 billion in revenue in Q2 2017, according to Synergy Research. Collaboration was the highest growth segment. Microsoft is the clear leader in overall enterprise SaaS revenues, having overtaken Salesforce a year ago. Microsoft's acquisition last year of LinkedIn gave its SaaS operations a significant boost.

Microsoft and Red Hat this week expanded their nearly 2-year-old alliance to bridge the gap between Windows and open source computing with the launch of several new initiatives to help enterprise customers more easily adopt container solutions. The announcement bolsters an alliance that began in 2015, when Microsoft began offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure.

Oracle earlier this week announced the availability of its Exadata platform on its next-generation cloud infrastructure, which essentially means the company is providing Exadata as a Service. The Oracle Cloud infrastructure is a comprehensive set of integrated, subscription-based services that let businesses run any workload in an enterprise-grade cloud managed by Oracle.

CoreOS on Thursday announced the general availability of the Kubernetes container management Tectonic platform on Microsoft's Azure cloud. The Tectonic platform enables enterprises to run Kubernetes on a single platform across various cloud and bare metal environments. Prior to this release, the Tectonic platform was available on Amazon Web Services and bare metal servers.

Federal agencies already under the gun to modernize their information technology capabilities have a new set of standards to meet as a result of an executive order President Donald Trump issued this spring. The directive not only will affect agency managers in their IT operations and acquisition activities, but also will have a significant effect on IT vendors.

You're probably tired of reading that the Internet of Things is the hottest thing going, and that IoT is a boon to technology and, simultaneously, a potential disaster for security and privacy. However, over the past few years, another IoT-related technology has been growing: vehicle to vehicle. V2V is a way for automobiles to communicate directly with other vehicles on the road.

The American Technology Council, which President Donald Trump established this spring by executive order, has four years to rebuild the federal government's information technology structure. A massive reboot of both hardware and software will be necessary to bring government computers up to modern standards. The effort will force many government agencies to shift years of floppy disk and other outdated storage technologies to the cloud.

Hyperloop One has conducted a successful first test of a specially designed vehicle to travel in a vacuum environment. The company achieved controlled propulsion and levitation of a Hyperloop One vehicle at 70 mph on a 315-foot test track in the Nevada desert. The test vehicle reached nearly 2Gs of acceleration during its brief 5.3 second test run on the specially built track.

HPE on Tuesday introduced the world's largest single-memory computer as part of The Machine, its research project into memory-driven computing. The computer has 160 T-bytes of memory, and HPE expects the architecture to allow memory to scale up to 4.096 yottabytes. The memory is spread across 40 physical nodes that are interconnected using a high-performance fabric protocol.

Red Hat on Thursday announced JBoss AMQ 7, a messaging platform upgrade that enhances its overall performance and improves client availability for developers. JBoss AMQ is a lightweight, standards-based open source platform designed to enable real-time communication between applications, services, devices and the Internet of Things, based on the Apache ActiveMQ and Apache Qpid community projects.

Federal agencies seeking to deal with huge amounts of information have begun embracing the software-defined data center, a technology tool that has come into vogue for managing and storing data. The SDDC is an offshoot of IT virtualization that uses a software-defined architecture. Agencies have been striving to save money and improve data storage and management in response to government mandates.

Qualcomm has announced a collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate next-generation cloud services on the 10nm Qualcomm Centriq 2400 ARM-based platform. The collaboration will span multiple future generations of hardware, software and systems. The two have been working for several years on ARM-based server enablement, optimizing a version of Windows Server for ARM running on the Centriq 2400.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has inked a deal to acquire flash storage firm Nimble Storage, once viewed as a darling of Wall Street, for $12.50 a share in cash, or $1 billion. HPE also agreed to assume or pay out Nimble Storage's unvested equity awards, which are valued at $200 million. Upon completion of the deal, Nimble Storage will merge with a unit of HPE and become a subsidiary of the company.

Seeking Alpha is an online outfit that offers investors good research and analysis on tech vendors, and it is especially well versed in Oracle. Its writers' expertise involves matching technologies to investment attractiveness. I am sure you are familiar with the type. XYZ company's product does this, it should result in sales of this much, and that will drive profits so that the stock is worth so much. You get the idea.

SnapRoute, a developer of open source networking software, announced that it has raised $25 million in Series A financing led by Norwest Venture Partners with new support from AT&T and Microsoft Ventures. SnapRoute, founded by CEO Jason Forrester and other former Apple engineers, plans to use the funding to speed up the development of open source networking software for Fortune 500 firms.

Docker on Wednesday announced that it will spin out containerd, a key component of its Docker Engine, for open source use. Containerd will provide an open, stable and extensible base for building non-Docker products and container solutions, the company said. Some of the top cloud providers have committed to making contributions to the project, giving it instant credibility within the community.