Enterprise IT

Gmail's 100-minute outage Tuesday was the result of a cascading series of router failures caused by a combination of hardware maintenance and traffic policies, Google said. The failure of the third-most popular Web mail service left users around the world who access the system online instead of thro...

IBM is rolling out a public desktop cloud offering that it claims is the first subscription service of its kind. IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud "enables end-users to have the same capabilities of the traditional desktop, but with a thin client and delivered from the data center," said A...

Korean electronics giant Samsung on Monday announced that it will launch a mobile application store in Europe on Sept. 14. This follows the release of its mobile widget software development kit around mid-August and its unveiling in July of the Samsung Application Seller Site, a portal geared toward...

One of my predictions for 2009 was that many of the new Obama administration's initiatives would promote and accelerate the growth of Software as a Service and cloud computing. What I underestimated at that time was how quickly government itself would embrace SaaS and cloud computing to improve its ...

Microsoft has asked an appeals court to stay an injunction that Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas issued against the sale of Microsoft Word. The judge made the ruling after a jury found that Microsoft had infringed on a patent held by Toronto-based i4i. It is set to go...

Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas has issued an injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word after a jury found that Microsoft had infringed on a patent held by a Toronto-based company. The plantiff, i4i, sued Microsoft in 2007, alleging that Microsoft Word unlawfully...

There's a rumor that honor exists among thieves, but outside of Robin Hood, no one considers them a bunch of do-gooders. Yet there may be a bright side to their shadowy work, at least in terms of enterprise software. Why has Microsoft, a company known to be almost brutal in its license-protection pr...

Cloud computing and Software as a Service have emerged as the hot new technology trends in 2009. Companies from Microsoft to Big Blue to Oracle have announced their intentions to move away from their lucrative and proprietary models to address this fundamental shift in how software is delivered. The...

On June 10, Antenna Software completed the acquisition of Dexterra for an undisclosed amount, solidifying its position as a key player in the mobile middleware/platform space, with a sharpened focus on field force enablement. This market grab comes on the heels of Antenna's acquisition of Vettro's s...

Worldwide PC shipments will fall on a year-over-year basis for the first time in nearly a decade, but all signs still point to a late-year tech sector recovery, according to research firm iSuppli. Shipments will fall 4 percent from 2008 sales, to 287.3 million units, the firm predicted. This is the ...

Microsoft is taking a new pricing approach with its upcoming Windows Azure cloud operating system: It will allow customers to pay on a per-use basis rather than calculating license fees according to number of processors or some other traditional measure. Microsoft reportedly will charge for the serv...

Though consumers won't be able to buy a copy of Windows 7 until October, businesses will reportedly be able to order copies of the upcoming operating system on Sept. 1. However, the OS doesn't look like it will rake in money from the majority of businesses -- at least, not right away. In fact, more ...

The initial success and rapid growth of cloud computing is attracting a "cloud rush" of players twisting the original concept to suit their proprietary purposes and confusing IT and business decision-makers in the process. This proliferation process is also accelerating the inevitable shakeout of va...

Large, mid-size and small businesses that were already using Gmail for their communications needs may have forgotten that the email application was still officially a beta app -- that is, a work in progress, with all the tinkering and occasional downtime that goes along with the label. On Tuesday, h...

When the economic crisis hit last year, much of the government response was targeted at shoring up public faith in what once had been perceived as rock solid institutions. We all are now highly aware that these foundations were not as sturdy as once believed, and as a result, many are justifiably sk...