The first quarter of 2009 went pretty much as planned in the cloud computing and web infrastructure market. The sector continued to mature, with new announcements by big players such as Sun, Google and Amazon, as well as new entrants to the space. Enterprise adoption of cloud services fueled interest in cloud standards, openness and security, while private cloud services took shape, with new offerings aimed at boosting utility and cutting costs. Hardware trends continued to focus on energy-efficient offerings, with non-x86 architectures gaining popularity for specialized offerings. Increased attention and adoption continued to boost the volume of data, supporting further efforts around MapReduce and data mining activities, as well as content delivery and storage. The quarter was capped by a proposed acquisition of Sun by IBM.