Cisco plans to buy privately held software company newScale Inc. – a move that will further entrench the tech giant in the highly competitive cloud computing space. newScale provides software that offers IT organizations a self-service portal to select and quickly deploy cloud services within their businesses on an as-needed basis. The financial terms of the deal were undisclosed. Cisco reports that the deal would be completed in the second half of its fiscal year 2011.

“Cloud computing represents a major shift in the evolution of the Internet, and as more customers migrate from traditional IT infrastructures, the need for rapid self-provisioning and efficient management becomes increasingly critical," said Parvesh Sethi, senior vice president of Cisco Services, in a press release.  "With the acquisition of newScale, Cisco will be able to accelerate the deployment of cloud services through a service catalog and self-service portal that allows customers to easily manage their IT infrastructures."

Providing a cloud computing services platform appears to be a step in the right direction. Research firm Gartner, predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud-computing service, while 30 percent of them will pay for cloud-computing infrastructure.

In fact, you need not look further than Salesforce.com to recognize the bottom line-boosting powers of offering cloud computing services. As reported earlier by TechZone360.com, the San Francisco-based company is anticipating revenue of about $2 billion in fiscal 2012.

“After taking a decade to achieve our first billion dollar year in fiscal 2009, we believe that our strong growth this year will allow us to deliver approximately $2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2012, making Salesforce.com the first cloud computing company to achieve that milestone,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO Salesforce.com, in a press release.

Results for Salesforce.com’s fiscal third quarter include total revenue of $429 million, an increase of 30 percent on a year-over-year basis. Subscription and support revenues reached $403 million, an increase of 31 percent on a year-over-year basis. And professional services and other revenues hit the $26 million mark, an increase of 10 percent on a year-over-year basis.