Enterprise IT

Microsoft announced last week it will provide its latest software, including Windows 8, to the Department of Defense in a $617 million deal that the DoD said will help streamline costs and foster inter-agency collaboration. Under the three-year deal, the Air Force, Army and Defense Information Syste...

Small businesses often find it challenging to gain access to the federal information technology market, despite efforts by government agencies to smooth the procurement process for small companies. In a move to provide more opportunity for small businesses, the federal General Services Administratio...

Some Netflix customers found themselves without service on Christmas Eve -- an unpardonable lapse on a day when many are snuggled in their homes and eager for entertainment. The streaming video provider has caught its fair share of flak for the outage -- but it was not solely to blame for its servic...

How much do federal agencies need to spend on data center consolidation investments now, in order to save money later? It could be quite a lot. The U.S. Department of Labor, for example, figures that $60 million or so will do the trick in meeting its data center consolidation goals. Last month, DOL ...

Google is heading into the new year with a new set of enterprise customers, the result of moves made this year to revamp its cloud-based productivity applications. For years, Google has been infiltrating areas beyond its core search business. This was the first year it was able to make real headway ...

The U.S. government's program to consolidate federal data centers presents an opportunity for improving IT management that goes well beyond the objective of just trying to tidy up data center operations and save a little money. As a result of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, the num...

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced that it has demanded nine data brokerage companies explain how they collect and use consumer data. The nine are Acxiom, Corelogic, Datalogix, eBureau, ID Analytics, Intelius, Peekyou, Rapleaf and Recorded Future. These sites offer information on just...

Google avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting close to $10 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company. Bermuda, along with a handful of other locales, is notorious for providing offshore solutions to multinationals eager to structure cash flow operations to thei...

SaaS has become an accepted alternative to traditional on-premises enterprise applications, and a broader set of cloud services is becoming a viable option for businesses seeking more flexible, economical computing capabilities. Adoption of these services is accelerating rapidly, because they are de...

RIM is getting some positive government attention for the yet-to-be-released BlackBerry 10 platform. Just months after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it would abandon its longstanding use of the BlackBerry system and give its employees iPhones instead, the agency has decided to g...

The Federal Communications Commission approved a proposal from the Dish Network that would allow it to convert spectrum currently allocated for satellite service into airwaves that could support a land-based wireless network. Dish did not lay out specific plans for its next step with the spectrum, s...

The fact that the Internet has no boundaries of time or geography has changed the way businesses operate forever. One feature of the Internet is that it has allowed creative businesses to avoid, or at least minimize their tax liabilities. In particular, Google's business success means that it has to...

"If you can keep your wits, when all about you are losing theirs, maybe you just don't understand the situation." That often-cited spoof of a Rudyard Kipling poem comes to mind as the doomsday scenarios of the federal budget Fiscal Cliff begin to mount. Maybe cool heads won't prevail. Maybe panic is...

The duo that led the Clinton-era FCC, Reed Hundt and Blair Levin, recently published a new e-book titled "The Politics of Abundance." It looks to the success of the 1990's for solutions to today's problems. They lay out a framework and a path to regenerate the kind of growth and innovation we saw du...

The meat-cleaver approach to reducing costs in business or government always has the virtue of at least being simple to apply -- although frequently painful in the execution. For the U.S. government, an across-the-board cut of roughly 9 percent in discretionary civilian and defense outlays is, in fa...