Enterprise IT

Ten years after the Internal Revenue Service first flipped the switch on electronic tax filing, key lawmakers said Monday the time has come to make e-filing free for all taxpayers -- a move that could cost software makers millions in annual revenues. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Se...

Hard drive maker Seagate Technology is taking solid state drive manufacturer STEC to court over patent infringement. In a suit filed Monday in Northern California's U.S. District Court, Seagate claims STEC has violated four patents that Seagate had registered between 2002 and 2006. The battle is foc...

Adobe may still enjoy a resounding lead with its Flash rich-media runtime and player, but Microsoft appears to be gradually gaining ground with its Silverlight application platform. At the National Association of Broadcasters Show 2008 in Las Vegas, Microsoft on Monday announced a raft of new compan...

Phil Hester has exited the chief technology officer post at Advanced Micro Devices, according to reports, and he won't be replaced. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based manufacturer of computer processors, which reported more than $6 billion in revenue in 2007 and trails only Intel in that market, reportedly...

"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction," said Sir Isaac Newton. While he made that observation centuries before the dot-com boom and bust, his words remain quite relevant today. After large corporation executives took advantage of their positions and wreaked financial havoc, the federal go...

Over the past five years, 42 of the technology companies that Mercury Ventures has invested in have made the transition from publicly traded to private firms. That is part of a larger trend among smaller publicly traded companies, for whom the benefits of being public no longer clearly outweigh the ...

If you consider the traditional quality assurance process -- in which QA is a set of tasks that occur in a serial fashion after development -- it becomes clear that many of the desired service-oriented architecture benefits such as agility, cost efficiency and higher quality are placed at risk. The...

The government has temporarily banned IBM from attaining new contracts with federal agencies while investigators look into interactions between some company workers and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employees. The EPA issued a notice of temporary suspension related to an agency investigation ...

Plunging prices in a glutted memory-chip market served as a weight on semiconductor sales worldwide, although sales did increase by 1.5 percent in February, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Fueled by sales of computers and mobile phones outside the U.S., global year-on-year semic...

North American manufacturers have faced years of intense, globalized competition. This onslaught compelled them to modernize their manufacturing processes to compete effectively. The result has been that many plants have become models of efficiency and agility. This modernization allowed manufactu...

In a bid to boost confidence in the reliability of its cloud computing initiative, Amazon Web Services on Thursday launched functionality that allows users to have static IP addresses. Previously, the service did not offer static IP addresses, which made it more difficult for Web developers to creat...

Oracle's shares fell 7.2 percent Thursday on news that the company did not sell as many new licenses in its third quarter as expected. The stock closed at $19.43 per share, down from $20.94 a day earlier. Sales of new software in Q3 registered $1.6 billion, a 16 percent increase from the same quarte...

Most organizations are under the misimpression that by simply maintaining a generic legal hold policy, they will avoid any adverse consequences in litigation. Those organizations are wrong. In fact, one could have a brilliant legal hold plan and still face sanctions if it fails to address the down...

The Software and Information Industry Association filed eight more lawsuits against eBay sellers the group says are hawking pirated versions of software from Adobe, bringing to 17 the number of suits filed so far this year. The SIIA said it filed suits against sellers based in Arizona, California, C...

Software maker BMC will buy data center automation firm BladeLogic in a move that could help it fend off incursions into its core market from rivals such as EMC and IBM. BMC will use BladeLogic's products to round its own business service management software portfolio. When combined, the platform wi...