Enterprise IT

Global sales of semiconductors dropped by 2.8 percent in 2008, according to a sales report released Monday by the Semiconductor Industry Association. It is the first decline in worldwide sales since 2001, the organization said. Total sales for 2008 were $248.6 billion, down from $255.6 billion in 20...

When large businesses need to change fast, the IT systems need to do more than keep up with change -- they need to manage, define and secure it. IT repositories are now effectively orchestrating multiple enterprise systems of record that must quickly operate together as result of massive mergers and...

Chip giant Intel announced Wednesday that it will shutter four of its semiconductor factories and lay off as many as 6,000 employees by the end of 2009. The news follows on the heels of media speculation that Intel could suffer its first quarterly loss since Q4 of 1986. Intel said last week that it ...

Microsoft startled Wall Street -- as well as the tech community -- with earnings that point to at least two quarters of declining profit and revenue, as well as plans to slash its workforce by 5,000. The rapidly declining economy, of course, is at the root of Microsoft's financial situation, which e...

A competitor of computing giant IBM has accused Big Blue of violating antitrust laws in the European Union. In a complaint to the European Commission, mainframe computer maker T3 Technologies has accused IBM of using its dominance of the mainframe market to shut out competitors. T3 claims that IBM k...

Chip giant Intel has slashed the price of some of its microprocessors in what company spokesperson George Alfs has called "a regularly scheduled price move." Among Intel's myriad chips, the Celeron 570 saw the steepest cut, going from $134 to $70, a 48 percent decrease. Other notable price cuts for ...

IBM plans to release a Web-based version of its Lotus business software, called "LotusLive," its latest contribution to the fast-growing cloud computing market. IBM also announced a portfolio of Web-based social networking and collaboration software services through partnerships with LinkedIn, SAP, ...

The European Union is taking aim at Microsoft again, with its antitrust regulatory arm alleging on Friday that the U.S.-based software giant is breaking European anticompetitive rules by tying Internet Explorer to Windows. Such a link harms competition, undermines product innovation and reduces cons...

Spend wisely and be bold, or stay home and keep cover. In 2009, these are the choices IT professionals at banks and financial institutions will face. While the current economic turmoil has many running for cover, hiding your head in the sand will not protect your company from these tough times. As 2...

Lower total cost of ownership and little or no IT infrastructure to maintain are good starting arguments for moving to the cloud. While such concepts are easy to understand in the abstract, considering cloud computing on an industry-specific basis drives home some surprising limitations on this hot ...

There are plenty of figures to show the efficiencies and cost savings that cloud computing can deliver, but here's one you're unlikely to hear during a sales pitch: The benefits of cloud computing are not linear with a project's progress. That means if you only complete about 80 percent of the proje...

Google is launching a reseller recruitment drive that could herald a shift in the way the company markets its products. Google has used resellers in the past -- the partners it inherited along with the Postini acquisition, for example. Now, though, it is hoping to recruit "a very large number" of re...

Merrill Lynch once forecast that the cloud computing market would reach an eye-popping $160 billion by 2011, a prediction that mostly drew skepticism. While sizing up the expectations for a nascent tech market is equal parts art and science, there are growing indications that $160 billion may indeed...

Cloud computing may still be in its infancy, but Google, Amazon and IBM -- as well as other large vendors -- have rolled out cloud services at almost breathtaking speed. Indeed, it might appear these tier one vendors already have the multibillion dollar industry sewn up. That is not true, of course....

Microsoft is making Windows 7 available as a public beta on an unlimited basis following a surge in demand that crashed the site after it first posted the code. Microsoft had originally planned to roll out the Windows 7 public beta on a limited basis; initially, it was to have become available to th...