IBM and Google have joined hands to launch a cloud computing service focused on medium to small sized businesses in the next year.  They will jointly set up a global network of Linux based servers which will use Xen virtualization and Apache Hadoop.

In October 2007, both the companies started deploying their cloud computing platform at various universities including MIT and Stanford as an experiment and now they believe that it is ready for a commercial roll out.

Google had recently opened its Google Apps Engine, a platform for hosting applications in the cloud,  for developers as well as other cloud based enterprise services like email archiving and enterprise security.

While the Google Apps Engine may be focused on consumer applications, this partnership between Google and IBM wants to pull the IT infrastructure of small and medium businesses to the cloud.

Apart from offering the cloud computing services, Google and IBM are also likely to offer hosted business, collaboration, security and productivity applications from Google Apps, Postini and Tivoli suite of products.

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