It’s time to play a little catch-up on news from the world of cloud computing. With yours truly back in the game after two weeks of vacation, we’re starting with the juiciest update: a look at the progress on the somewhat controversial Broadcom-VMware pairing.

The last major hurdle the $61 billion Broadcom-VMware deal faced was in the U.K. But that got resolved in July, a week after the European Union also gave the transaction the green light. The United States poses little, if any, issue for Broadcom-VMware to close — it’s really up to China now. We take a look at what happened this week.

After that, we dive into some interesting findings from Aptum, in its latest cloud-centric report, the global managed service provider discovered that IT departments are overspending – big time – on cloud computing. Why? There are several reasons, which we highlight and that you’ll want to home in on because they could be key to expanding your business.

Next, and somewhat related to Aptum’s conclusions, research from Canalys points to organizations spending less on hyperscalers’ services. That’s putting a dent in the earnings at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, but don’t expect the numbers to stay down for too long. If Canalys is right, demand for AI is poised to overcome slowdowns.

Finally, we include some developer-oriented news from Red Hat and bold predictions from Accenture around edge computing (and AI … of course).

But let’s kick off this end-of-week, end-of-vacation cloud computing news with the latest on Broadcom-VMware. Start with the image above.