Applications

Since the early 1990s, companies have moved applications development and maintenance work to lower labor-cost countries, to varying degrees. Often referred to as "offshoring" or "outsourcing," this labor arbitrage has had an important effect on businesses' ability to reduce costs of ADM. Although co...

Microsoft reported strong revenue and solid earnings Thursday, with particular strength in Windows sales during its first fiscal quarter ending September 30. Revenue set a Q1 record of $16.20 billion, up 25 percent year-over-year. Net income was a healthy $5.41 billion. Office 2010, Windows 7 and X...

All mobile software applications are not created equal. Enterprise end-users have a fundamentally different expectation of their mobile apps than they do of their desktop apps. They expect rapid and easy access to secure and accurate information whenever and wherever it's needed. The impact of biome...

Two tech stalwarts -- Oracle and Research In Motion -- posted solid quarterly earnings, not only goosing their own shares, but delivering a boost to the stock market in general. The bigger surprise was RIM, which posted higher-than-expected second quarter earnings and gave a forecast for the third q...

Delivering and managing IT continues to be complex. Application demand continues to grow, while the maintenance and support of old applications, as well as the processes involved with new applications, lead to a frustrating user experience and constraints on flexibility and business agility. Many or...

A $30 billion information technology market is hard to pass up. That's why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' program to invest that huge amount of money in health records technology has received a lot of attention in the IT vendor community. That's normal. It is decidedly unusual, ho...

Microsoft's tablet project is a top priority for the company, CEO Steve Baller told financial analysts at a presentation Thursday. However, he remained coy on the details. Redmond is working with several OEM partners, and the new tablet will run Windows, Ballmer said. Several vendors, including Tosh...

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a patent case that has held the software industry and patent attorneys in suspense for much of the last year. However, the decision, which came down on the last day of the court's term, was worth the wait for advocates in favor of the patentability of business pro...

Microsoft used its annual TechEd Conference to pitch its forthcoming mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7, to business users. The platform will feature the kind of tight integration with Office applications that only the manufacturer of those applications can provide, the company insisted, along...

There has been a reorganization at the top of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division: Its president Robbie Bach, who has been with Microsoft for 22 years, is retiring. Also departing is J Allard, senior vice president of design and development for the division. A 19-year company veteran, All...

Gut-wrenching recessions have a way of changing things ... for people, families and companies. They can also, perhaps like no other event, provoke change in large IT vendors like HP, IBM, TIBCO and Oracle. Based on recent HP announcements and IBM's Impact conference, these two of the very largest, f...

The ongoing buzz surrounding cloud computing -- particularly public clouds -- is far outpacing actual deployments by mainstream users. To date, only 14 percent of companies have deployed or plan to deploy a private cloud infrastructure within the next two calendar quarters. Instead, as businesses sl...

SAP has inked a deal to acquire mobile and database software maker Sybase for $5.8 billion in cash -- or $65 per share. That translates into a purchase price that is more than 55 percent over Sybase's trading price before rumors of the deal became public, which was $41.57 per share. The deal, which ...

Microsoft launched Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 for business customers Wednesday morning in an event held in New York City. Office 2007, the last version of Microsoft's cash cow -- Office represents 25 percent of Microsoft's annual revenue -- came out four years ago. Office 2010 offers a plethora...

The Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers are gaining market share at the expense of Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer. Statistics from NetApplications.com show that Chrome had 6.73 percent of the browser market in April. Firefox had nearly 25 percent, and Internet Explorer continued t...