Enterprise IT

Dropbox announced Friday it has inked a deal to acquire Orchestra, owner of the popular Mailbox iOS email app that aims to help users with crowded in-boxes simplify their lives. The Mailbox app's 14-person team will join Dropbox, but will continue to develop separately as its own app. Though new to ...

Microsoft was once rapidly growing like Google and Apple. Then it changed. It became a very large, but very slow growing company. These days it seems stuck, struggling to break into other businesses. The growth wave Microsoft rode crested years ago, but it hasn't been able to catch the next wave. It...

A growing number of established and emerging software and technology vendors are seeking to take advantage of the convergence of Big Data and the cloud. None has made a bigger bet than IBM. Since 2005, IBM has spent more than $16 billion on 35 acquisitions to boost its analytics capabilities. The ...

The cost of keeping a smartphone can add up, but an app developer may have found a way to help users make money off their devices, as the company tries to offer a unique twist on the mobile ad space. SmartAds is giving consumers the ability to "sell" adspace on their Android devices, and is offering...

The White House agreed Monday with consumers who want to be able to legally unlock their mobile phones and tablets and move them to the carrier of their choice. The Obama administration's statement was in response to a petition on the White House's We The People forum that disagreed with the Library...

Taken together, VCE's recently announced new offerings qualify as a generational step forward not only for the company, but also for the cause of converged infrastructures and, most importantly, for VCE customers and partners. Prior to this, the company's Vblocks delivered dramatic improvements in c...

Google and other aggregators won a partial victory Friday in the lower house of the German parliament, where lawmakers approved legislation that would allow publishers to protect their digital copyrights by charging to fully reproducing their content. Questions remain about whether other countries -...

The U.S. government has some unique -- and exacting -- security requirements related to the adoption of cloud technology. These internal government security hurdles have resulted in significant outreach to expertise from commercial information technology companies. The latest example is an invitatio...

Three to five years in the information technology business may seem like a long time, so it may appear that U.S. government agencies have been pursuing cloud technology for ages; incipient projects began as far back as 2008. It was also more than two years ago that the White House initiated a progra...

Information technology vendors who sell hardware and software to the federal market are keenly aware of significant flaws in the way government agencies purchase IT. An effort to reform IT procurement has been conducted by the Obama administration for the last two years -- with some improvement. Som...

Oracle is not letting go of its Java patent infringement beef against Google despite its sound drubbing last spring when U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that programming APIs were not subject to copyright protection. Last week, Oracle took the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the ...

Business IT solution development generally follows specific trends and overlapping eras. The first, calculation, occurred as digital products and services wholly replaced adding machines and other mechanical business devices. The second, computation, mirrored the evolution of digitized solutions for...

The current winter of discontent in the U.S. Congress over federal finances does not bode well for cooperation in other areas. Yet legislators push on, and among top Congressional priorities for 2013 is the enactment of legislation regarding the role of the federal government in dealing with nationa...

One of the age-old challenges that has plagued the software industry, like many others, is how vendors can reach small- and mid-sized businesses with their software products. Although today's Software as a Service model eliminates many of the distribution challenges of the past, it hasn't overcome t...

Yelp's revenue and monthly unique visitors rose during its most recent quarter, but the site still reported a net loss as it funded expansion into new markets. The site, which provides information and crowdsourced reviews about local restaurants, entertainment and businesses, reported a net loss of...