Colleges Unite to Drive Down Cost of 'Cloud Computing' - Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

In one of her first public appearances as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard this month, Meg Whitman beamed in by videoconference to a meeting of college technology leaders to announce the company's participation in what colleges are calling a "community cloud"—a pool of high-performance computers that researchers can tap into online, as needed, from any participating campus. The officials who stood gazing up at Ms. Whitman, a former gubernatorial candidate in California and eBay executive, call the community cloud a new era of campus technology, and a new way to negotiate deals with tech giants like HP. The big idea: Colleges can collectively bargain with technology companies to establish more campus-friendly terms and prices than any one college could get on its own. In this case, the broker for the deal was Internet2, a nonprofit consortium with some 235 college members.