According to TechCrunch cloud service provider Rackspace might do like Dell and take itself private, turning away from public market accountability in order to focus on its business.

“The pressures of being a public company are too much,” a source tells the news site. Reportedly the company is in negotiation with a private equity firm to borrow capital for the deal.

Back in May 2014 Rackspace hired Morgan Stanley to "evaluate the inbound strategic proposals" from potential partners. The TechCrunch source says Rackspace is evaluating a least 3 acquisition offers, including bids from HP and IBM.

Apparently HP is offering up to $43 per share, making a Rackspace buy worth over $6.1 billion (its current market value is at around $4.8 billion). On the other hand the IBM deal apparently fell through.

CSC adds security, compliance, data infrastructure and cloud deployment to its Big Data Platform-as-a-Service (BDPaaS) offering as it continues to integrate its product portfolio.

The CSC BDPaaS offers batch analytics, fine-grained and interactive analytics, and real-time streaming analytics from all big data offerings, including Facebook and Google, with reference architectures from IBM, SAP, Oracle and Teradata.

It supports several cloud infrastructures, including Amazon, CSC Cloud Solutions, OpenStack and Vsphere private clouds. Customers can also leverage on the ServiceMesh Agility Platform for management, governance and security across public, private and hybrid clouds.

Google adds new services and tools to its cloud platform at its Google I/O developer conference with the Cloud Dataflow data processing and analysis service and additional monitoring and debugging tools.

Cloud Dataflow is a successor to MapReduce (an experimental App Engine feature) built on Google's Flume and MillWheel "stream processing" technologies. According to the company it provides “actionable insights from your data while lowering operational costs without the hassles of deploying, maintaining or scaling infrastructure.”

At the conference Google showed Dataflow in action by using it to analyse World Cup match reactions on Twitter. Not that Twitter doesn't already have something of the sort (an open source tool dubbed Summingbird), but Dataflow will be available to all as a cloud service.

Respect Network launches what it describes as the first global network for trusted private data sharing-- a platform to help users manage their online identity and data via encrypted private clouds.

The network's aim is nothing less than replacing current centralised social networks with a private cloud for every user or business from 3rd party provider of choice. Data sharing takes place over private peer-to-peer connections between members (with no middleman), meaning one can share private data as easily as they can over public clouds, but with the addition of privacy.

Membership involves a €20 annual fee granting users data management tools, a small amount of cloud storage and a lifetime "cloud name" beginning with a equals sign, Twitter-stye (so this writer's cloud name would be =marco.attard, for instance).

Members also have to sign up to the Respect Trust Framework, a semi-legal document outlining the principles of the network.