From the 'who said penguins can't fly' files:

Verizon Business rolled out its Computing as a Service (CaaS) product today, which brings the big carrier directly into the cloud marketplace. While the cloud is a compute infrastructure, it still needs an operating system and for Verizon that means both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows.

That's a big deal in my view, it means that when it comes to choice for cloud computing from one of the biggest US carriers there are only two choices:  Red Hat or Microsoft.

Unix isn't a choice in the Verizon cloud and neither are other flavors of Linux. Have we now reached a point in the IT marketplace where it really is just a battle between Microsoft and Red Hat? 

What will be interesting to see over time from Verizon is how the numbers shake down in terns of actual usage. That is - are more Verizon users running their cloud apps on Linux or Windows?

Red Hat already has a cloud offering with Amazon - as does Ubuntu. Red Hat also has a partnership with Cisco on the Unified Computing System (UCS) where some 80 percent of initial deployments were all using Linux. Clearly Red Hat sees opportunity in the cloud and clearly they are getting some traction with some of the biggest names in technology to push Linux off the ground and into the cloud.

"Verizon CaaS was engineered to meet the challenging security needs and performance requirements faced by enterprises and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system is playing a big part as we bring this unique offering to customers around the world," said Michael Marcellin, vice president of global managed solutions, Verizon in a statement.