Enterprise IT

What the heck is wrong at Microsoft? It may be an important company, but it's an older company that has definitely lost its way. It can recover but doesn't see how. The solution seems so obvious from the outside. However, there is a sense that arrogance is getting in the way of clear thinking. It is...

Product integrity is a key element in business and increasingly important in the information technology sector, where products and services are highly vulnerable to the creation of copies and counterfeits. Both IT vendors and their customers are equally at risk when phony and faulty products enter ...

Over the past three-plus decades, it's hard to think of a business computing-related technology that's driven more fundamental value than virtualization, and it's for a very simple reason: Since hardware evolves at a far faster pace than software, systems tend to deliver far more performance than ne...

The U.S. Department of Commerce is planning a major upgrade of its customer relationship management capabilities, which is likely to include a multiyear contract opportunity for a cloud-based CRM system. The project underscores the increasing awareness of federal agencies of the potential use of clo...

The White House and eight companies including Google and Microsoft announced a joint effort to mobilize against online piracy and counterfeiting Monday with the help of a set of best practices developed in conjunction with the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The effort is designed to limit the reve...

For most technologists in the enterprise nowadays, cloud is a pretty big deal -- and securing it can be an even bigger deal still. Security was the top concern of 46 percent of respondents to a recent survey by North Bridge Venture Partners. While this number is actually down from last year's 55 pe...

A persistent myth in the tech world is that major enterprises in highly regulated industries are risk-averse and reluctant to adopt new technology innovations. In the case of the financial services sector, this has not been the case for years, and it is being disproved again as a growing number of f...

Anyone who's ever made a presentation with data knows that making data presentable isn't always easy. That's part of the rationale behind Databoard, a new tool from Google that's designed to help users do just that. Announced on Tuesday, Google Databoard gives users a new way to share data insights....

The policy debate that has been raised by the Obama administration's healthcare reform program continues to smolder -- and even break into heated rhetoric when political supporters and critics of "Obamacare" get into the fray. However, in the three years or so that the program has been under way, it...

There's no question that books have gone digital. Sure, there are still paper books aplenty in a smattering of brick-and-mortar bookstores -- and available online as well -- but there's no escaping the proverbial writing on the wall that book-selling behemoth Amazon now sells more electronic books t...

Open cloud provider Rackspace has entered into a yearlong contributor agreement with CERN openlab whereby it will deliver a hybrid cloud solution based on OpenStack to help CERN research the origins of the universe, the company announced on Monday. CERN openlab provides a framework for testing and v...

Technology vendor partnerships come in two general flavors: 1) strategically transformative relationships that aim to develop and deliver something essentially new; and 2) tactically accretive relationships that strengthen the partners' individual efforts. The first sort typically occurs between com...

E-commerce companies rely on Big Data to glean valuable, real-time insights that drive smarter, more profitable business decisions. Problems can arise, however, when Big Data infrastructures become riddled with bottlenecks and don't perform optimally, causing critical intelligence to be delayed or u...

A U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner is urging consumers to take more control over their data. The call to action comes as revelations that the NSA is spying on Americans to an unprecedented degree continue to shake the country. Unease has been mounting over the amount of data companies are handing ove...

In a drive to reduce government computing costs, federal agencies have been required to cut and consolidate data centers. So far, agencies have reduced hundreds of operational centers -- but they still have fallen short of a five-year target set when the consolidation program was launched in Februar...