Articles by Erika

The four-month-long process to find a strategic investor for Satyam --the India-based outsourcer that rattled the global businesscommunity with its ex-chairman's confession in January of longstanding accountingfraud -- is apparently over Venturbay Consultants, a unit of Tech Mahindra, is acquiring31 percent of Satyam for US$351 million, or 302.76 m...

The Business Intelligence (BI) space has been on a mission for severalyears. The goal: to simplify the way these applications work for the end-user. Several years ago, one practically needed a Ph.D. to be able to ekeout usable data. Today, most line of business users can get the sameresults.

Google's YouTube and Universal Music Group (UMG) are partnering to launch Vevo, amusic video vehicle featuring UMG's videos. The site will launch inthe coming months. Few details have been provided about the launch; however, both companies will share in the revenues, and additional deals with other music labels are being negotiated, the companies said...

Part 1 of this three-part series focused on planning out a successful move to a cloud environment. Part 2 investigates obstacles and strategies relating to customization in the cloud For some companies, the decision to move to the cloud is a no-brainer -- especially if they limit their planning to pure number crunching. Without a doubt, the savings...

Cisco has announced its intention to acquire Tidal Software for US$105million in cash and retention-based bonuses. The privately held company makes intelligent application management and automationsoftware. Cisco says that the company's line willenhance its data center product and service delivery offerings.Customers will essentially be able to be...

Consumers have come to accept that songs can be purchased a la carte for 99 US cents via the Internet. That is a result, of course, of Apple's revolutionary introduction of the iPod music player and the iTunes music store several years ago. Before then, consumers had few options for downloading music onto digital music players -- and most of them were illegal...

Sun Microsystems has rejected IBM's offer to acquire it for US$7 billion, a move that took the tech industry by surprise and sent Sun stock plummeting Speculation is rampant as to why Sun Microsystems spurned the offer -- a move critics view as downright foolish in this economy -- as well as what the two companies may do next, and who else might h...

Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, saidinContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players, but Jarman hopes to change that.

The Pinup Shoes Web site is moving to the cloud. The decision was a no-brainer for Jim Keough, e-commerce manager for the company. "We are talking about cutting costs by 500 percent on the server with this move and getting, in exchange, a higher-performance environment," he told CRM Buyer....

A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate would give the government dramatic new powers to regulate and enforce federal standards for cybersecurity The government already monitors and regulates military networks, of course. This measure, however, called the "Cybersecurity Act of 2009," would extend that control to private systems that power essential ac...

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has launched an app store for its iconic device. BlackBerry App Worldwent live Wednesday morning with some 1,000 applications available The site gives developers the option of setting up their own stores -- an interesting differentiator fromother carriers' app stores, noted ABI Research Senior Analyst Jeff Orr. ...

There's good news and bad news in the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report, newly released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The good news is that Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. are still growing, topping US$23 billion in 2008. The bad news: That growth appears to be flattening Indeed, it did n...

A group of large and small IT companies and institutions have signed the Open Cloud Manifesto, pledging to work together to establish and promote open standards in cloud computing Officially, there are now 38 signatories -- a group that includes IBM, AT&T, Sun Microsystems, Novell, Rackspace and SAP.

Every small vendor -- no matter the industry -- dreams of landing at least one big name Fortune 500 client. Such a client, of course, would lend it the necessary street cred -- not to mention revenue -- that all smaller companies need. It also might open the door to new product development and distribution possibilities. That has been the case wit...

Tesla Motors -- a Silicon Valley startup backed by entrepreneur Elon Musk, the South Africa-born cofounder of PayPal -- is making plans to roll out its second electric car. The company has released the details of its Tesla Model S. While production is, at best, two-and-a-half years away, car enthusiasts are gobbling up the specs....

Even if you were to limit yourself to the iMac product line -- as opposed to the heavy artillery computer graphics workstation, the Mac Pro -- you could easily spend US$1,600 to $3,200 for a souped-up machine. Mac addicts will tell you the price is worth it. What about everyone else, though? The price is steep, but the Apple brand -- strongly tied to the sex appeal and simply beautiful design of the Mac -- has enticed more than one casual buyer to spurn utilitarian Windows-based PCs...

There are reports that Cox and AT&T have begun cooperating with theRecording Industry Association of America's new antipiracy strategy --first announced in December -- of targeting illegal file-sharing activities through Internet service providers instead of through the courts. Once the RIAA identifies someone downloading or uploading copyrighted...

China reportedly has blocked access to YouTube without providing Google, which owns the video-sharing site, with any official explanation -- or even confirmation that it has indeed turned the site dark. It's suspected that the government objected to recently uploaded videos of Chinese police beating Tibetan monks during last year's uprising. China...

Failed efforts to reach a licensing agreement with Warner Music have led YouTube to unceremoniously yank thousands of user-created videos from the site. YouTube is required to follow intellectual property rights laws, of course. However, critics of the move contend the creators' use of content in many of the videos is allowable under the so-called fair use doctrine, which has made a regular appearance in digital content lawsuits over the last decade. ...

Oracle has acquired Relsys, a small private company that makes drug safety analytics software for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The terms of the deal were not revealed Relsys will continue to operate independently until the deal closes, which is expected to take place by this summer....