Apple’s finally revealed more details towards its personal cloud service, including its name; iCloud.  The product is to be unveiled at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6th, along with the release of Lion, the eighth major release for Mac OSX, and iOS 5, the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

iCloud is likely to be a major update for its existing cloud service Me.com, which features calendar and email syncing, among other things. But expanding its personal cloud service will prove an important part of Apple’s consumer appeal, especially as demand grows around storage and access needs.  Apple’s already got a nice line-up of compatible devices, from the iPad to the iPhone, Macbooks and such.   Upgrading the personal cloud capacity for this family of devices will also make Apple more appealing to media distributors, publishers and advertisers, all centering activity and access around the individual consumer.

Depending on how iCloud advances Apple’s personal cloud capabilities, the development could take Apple a step ahead of Google, Amazon and Microsoft in terms of personal cloud management.  While all of these players have been stumbling over music and movie cloud services in recent months, Apple’s looking to improve the whole of the personal cloud, closely aligned with its devices.  Bu as the cloud is central to Google’s Apps, Android OS and Chrome OS, the war over personal cloud services will be hard fought.

Apple, like many service providers these days, is recognizing the need to tack on storage to its offerings, with the cloud becoming a central aspect of future media, enterprise and advertising markets.  Storage isn’t Apple’s strong suite, but it’s becoming a necessary part of its sum total.  To this end, Apple’s been building up its data storage centers, prepping in anticipation for a service like iCloud.

The personal cloud was an important part of ongoing discussions at the recent Citrix Synergy event, with Xiotech’s CEO George Symons joining theCube to talk about the role flash storage has played in his company’s current market position. There are plenty of lessons to be applied from the enterprise, but as we’ve seen from SAP Sapphire, the personal cloud is also growing in importance because of its forced acknowledgement within enterprise environments.  Between consumer and corporate demands, the personal cloud is a major part of virtualization, with scale-down becoming just as important as scaling up and out.