Enterprise IT

As global PC shipments rose 2.3 percent year over year in the third quarter, Taiwanese PC manufacturer Acer took the No. 2 spot in PC sales worldwide, according to market research firm IDC. That pushed Dell into third place; market leader HP, however, maintains its commanding lead. HP accounted for ...

Most business executives only spend money when they foresee a reasonable return on the investment, unless there is some other compelling reason for the expense -- like keeping them out of jail. To a large extent, the development of governance, risk management and compliance technologies was spurred ...

One of the biggest challenges in today's rapidly evolving cloud computing market, if you're an aspiring vendor, is how to clearly differentiate your offerings in an increasingly competitive environment. This is especially difficult because of the Web's knack for sucking the value out of everything i...

The free market is a wonderful thing. With regard to IT, I've always been impressed by the ability of vendors to rapidly identify and respond to market trends and customer demands. Whenever a new concept emerges onto the scene and a glimmer of interest begins to take hold, it's not long before we'...

To fully understand what Dell has accomplished with the Latitude Z and its other new business client offerings, it helps to remember where the company's desktop and notebook solutions began. For years, Dell emphasized substance and notably aggressive pricing over style, delivering products with soli...

In our global economy, where outsourcing is common and the Internet makes it possible to work from almost any location under the sun, it's not unusual for a company to find itself in the position of having a large portion of its staff in various locations outside the main offices. Particularly in th...

IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, an email and mobile mail service that interoperates with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. The package includes calendaring and contact management services. iNotes can be deployed to work with an existing on-premise email application or as a company's sole system...

Cisco Systems has made a huge play in the video-conferencing industry, acquiring one of the world's largest makers of such equipment for close to $3 billion. Cisco is acquiring Tandberg for about $26.37 a share in cash -- an 11 percent premium over Tandberg's closing price on the Oslo exchange. The ...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison can be a wellspring of newsworthy comments. Little wonder, then, that for close to an hour on Tuesday, IT journalists were rapt as he ruminated on the subjects of the day in an interview with Sun Microsystems' Ed Zander at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley. Ellison didn't...

The federal government has launched Apps.Gov, an online app store for federal agencies and workers, in the hope of reducing the $75 billion a year it spends on IT. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra introduced the site Tuesday. The goal is for the federal government to leverage the efficiencies ...

Innovations of the past few years provide an interesting hint at the future of e-commerce. Consider the following scenario: A CIO of a retail company gets off the phone, sits back, and begins to read his new monthly retail systems contract. The days of dealing with large development teams, countless...

Like every new generation, today's youth are unlike their predecessors, and they are poised to make a significant impact on society and business as they enter the workforce. While this may not seem like a revelation, what is important to keep in mind is who is pulling some of the strings that are al...

Today's volatile economy is pushing more companies to consider the merits of a virtual workplace for some or all of their employees. Often, however, the idea fails to go anywhere because neither managers nor their workers are sure how to get started. Also, attitudes among some old-school managers po...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has temporarily stayed an injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word that had been set to go into effect next month. Microsoft will be able to continue selling copies of its ubiquitous word processing software -- at least until the appeal of the o...

If you ask anyone today to define "cloud computing," there is slim chance you will get agreement on an exact definition. It is one of those emerging technologies that everyone knows they want to get into, but no one seems to know why or what the real benefit is. There is a lot of promise, but very ...