Enterprise IT

It amazes me that there are still analyst reports and other industry studies questioning the value of today's cloud solutions. While there is no question that the return on investment will vary depending on a variety of factors, there is plenty of evidence that anyone who employs cloud solutions tho...

Oracle is clearly not prepared to let go of the TomorrowNow case involving corporate theft it suffered at the hands of the service provider, which was acquired by rival SAP in 2005. In a legal filing this week, Oracle rejected the $272 million in court-ordered damages from SAP. A jury found in favor...

A bit over a year ago, the conventional wisdom related to enterprise IT vendors was fairly straightforward: Sheer size and depth of expertise gave end-to-end systems vendors unlimited access to the high ground. As markets recovered from the 2008 recession, enterprise customers would naturally stick ...

The U.S. Attorney's Office handling the case against Megaupload and its founder Kim Dotcom and associates has informed the court it's OK to begin deleting the Megaupload data beginning on Feb. 2, according to press reports. The two storage companies that host Megaupload data are free to sweep their ...

We've been hearing a lot about the cloud, but what is it exactly? Going forward, I will be writing about different companies and ideas and the cloud, but here I'll focus on this new area and how it will transform every company in every industry over the next several years. We are starting to see com...

Microsoft reported a mixed performance on Friday for its second quarter ending Dec. 31. Earnings were essentially flat compared with the same period last year. The company reported a profit of $6.62 billion, or 78 cents a share, on $20.89 billion in revenue. For the same period a year ago, Microsof...

IBM continues to carve out its own stake in the social enterprise app space -- a market forecast by Forrester Research to grow 61 percent each year to reach $6.4 billion by 2016 -- with the beta rollout of the next release of its enterprise social networking platform, IBM Connections. The beta, whic...

Salesforce.com has snagged a marquee name for its executive ranks: the former chief information officer of the United States, Vivek Kundra. Kundra, who left his post with the Obama administration last year, is joining Salesforce.com as executive vice president of emerging markets. Prior to serving a...

With little public fanfare, SAP and Google announced a strategic alliance to integrate SAP's BusinessByDesign and Google Apps during an "influencer" forum last month. Although senior executives from both companies boasted about the significance of this joint initiative, neither issued a public anno...

A few short months after killing off its Streak 5 and Streak 7 tablets, Dell is apparently discussing plans to make a comeback to the tablet market later this year. The company's Chief Commercial Officer Steve Felice said that Dell has been lying low and learning from competitors' mistakes. "I've kn...

Oracle has released its Big Data Appliance, which it announced last year at Oracle OpenWorld. With no release date promised, the industry was surprised by its relative speed to market. Less surprising was Oracle's enlistment of Cloudera -- the leading provider of Hadoop system management tools -- to...

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer delivered his final Consumer Electronics Show keynote in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Ballmer talked up Windows 8 and discussed additions to the Xbox platform and new Windows-based Nokia devices. The presentation, which featured "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest, kicked off the a...

A colleague of mine recently remarked in frustration that IT often finds itself in the worst possible position: taking the blame for a host of problems -- including increasing costs, growing capacity needs and poor responsiveness -- while being limited by a lack of real influence and control over t...

Gartner has released its global IT spending projections for 2012: It is forecasting a 3.7 percent increase from 2011 to $3.8 trillion. This forecast is a downward revision from its earlier 2012 outlook of 4.6 percent growth. Last year, IT spending clocked in at $3.7 trillion, which was up 6.9 percen...

Let's be frank: The main reason Oracle's latest quarterly revenues nosedived was backlash from users fed up with two years of price hikes on products, technical support, maintenance and licensing contracts -- and not because of a correction in the overall server hardware market. Yes, it's true that ...