Enterprise IT

Salesforce.com is on a buying binge as it attempts to build on its extraordinary sales momentum and broaden its market penetration within existing customer organizations and among new organizations. Since the end of last year, Salesforce.com has acquired five companies starting with Heroku and Etact...

For the past two years, media and vendors alike have proclaimed the cloud to be the next wave of IT -- promising to change computing as we know it. The reactions of many IT veterans who have lived through similar marketing barrages in the past have ranged from a cautious wait-and-see attitude to out...

The U.S. Department of Transportation not only wants to construct highways, subways, railroads and airports for the traveling public, but also wants to build bridges to information technology vendors and providers. The department has just launched a program to engage vendors and help educate DoT emp...

Amazon surprised the music world this week with the rollout of several products that will allow consumers to store and access their digital music in the cloud. Perhaps no one was more surprised, though, than the music studios, who appeared to have learned the details of the offering shortly before t...

Amazon on Tuesday announced a triple-play entry into the cloud-based music storage field. The online retail giant's trifecta consists of Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Cloud Player for Web and Amazon Cloud Player for Android. These three services let customers store music in the cloud and play it on any...

The Obama administration's program to more efficiently utilize information technology has worked -- but not well enough to get a passing grade from the U.S. Congress. Lawmakers are ratcheting up the pressure on federal agencies to improve their IT resource management -- including the way they procur...

Those of us who have been around the IT block a few times have witnessed remarkable changes in hardware and software capabilities. The big ones are fairly obvious in hindsight: from mainframes to minicomputers in the 1960s; from minis to PCs in the 1980s; and from dumb terminals to client-server te...

Oracle threw a punch that left HP's knees wobbling with the announcement that it's going to stop developing software to run on Intel's Itanium processor family. Intel's future roadmap focuses on x86 processors, Oracle explained. Intel promptly reiterated its support for the Itanium processor. HP war...

HP's recent Strategy Summit in San Francisco provided a coming-out party for the company's CEO Leo Apotheker before 350-plus IT industry analysts, and he wasted little time setting an agenda. Information, Apotheker said, represents the world's "most valuable commodity," reinforcing HP's plan's to su...

Google has enhanced its Google Docs product with a next-generation commenting system it is calling "Discussions." The new feature builds on Google's already strong collaboration bona fides and brings a small level of credibility to its otherwise dubious social media creds. Discussions builds on the ...

Monday was a big day for old-line tech companies: IBM discovered e-commerce and HP discovered cloud computing. HP CEO Leo Apotheker outlined the company's strategy at the HP Summit 2011 in San Francisco on Monday, emphasizing cloud computing, Internet-connected hardware, and its goal to plant webOS ...

IBM unveiled a new service on Monday that will help companies market and sell their products online. The new division, called "Smarter Commerce," offers IBM customers real-time marketing analytics and brand assessment tools for Facebook and Twitter. Smarter Commerce also offers consumer-behavior ana...

More and more, we are seeing tablets and smartphones becoming integral to user access. Coupled with the ever-increasing burden of managing or even seeking to lower storage costs, this has become a major challenge for IT departments. Public cloud storage -- also known as "Storage as a Service" -- mak...

An 8.9 Richter Scale-magnitude earthquake that hit Japan Friday has technology experts weighing in on the temblor's possible long- and short-term effects on technology in its many incarnations -- from mobile, social networks and cloud computing to WiFi, mainframes and security. Their analysis is cau...

When the Software as a Service idea emerged from the embers of the failed Application Service Provider model of the past, pioneers of the new generation of software solutions pointed to its multitenant architecture as the critical differentiator that would make it more scalable, economical and succe...