Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, will also run Alphabet, the company said on Tuesday. The transition gives Pichai oversight of the conglomerate’s vast array of expensive, futuristic endeavors, such as autonomous cars and new health-care technology.

The platform, called GreenLake Central, lets clients evaluate the cost, performance and security of their various computer data systems as well as buy new computing services.

There are lots of reasons to use smaller public cloud providers or a combination of public clouds.

Oracle Corp. is also mounting a legal challenge to the cloud contract, known as JEDI. The project is designed to consolidate the Defense Department’s cloud computing infrastructure and modernize its technology systems.

The agreement, to connect some of Salesforce’s software with Microsoft’s Teams corporate chat and use Azure for Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, expands an existing strategic relationship forged in the early days of Microsoft Chief Executive Officer...

With Azure Arc, any server, even if it's running behind a firewall or proxy, becomes just another resource as far as Azure is concerned. This could make Azure a compelling option for multi-cloud deployments.