Extending the iPad phenomenon from its high-profile executives to mainstream employees, SAP is equipping 1,000 of its workers with iPads running a range of enterprise applications, including SAP's own BusinessObjects BI tools, reports winshuttle.com.

Continue reading "iPad Love Hits 1,000 At SAP..."

How many of your employees are keeping passwords, log-ins and other information on sticky notes under their keyboards? Easy enough to find out.

Continue reading "Looking For A Password? Look Under A Keyboard..."

Businesses can now sign up for one of the Verizon Solutions for Business phone-plus-broadband service plans on a month-to-month basis. The carrier is also rolling out SMB-oriented website building tools.

Continue reading "Verizon Offers No-Contract Services, Website Kits..."

Have you recently launched a small company but can't come up with a catchy name? Or maybe you've been in business for quite some time and you're stuck on trying to find a good moniker for a new product or service. Or you need to test-drive your new-and-improved website to find out how user-friendly it is.

Continue reading "Squadhelp: Helping Small Businesses Tap The Crowd..."

Around the breakfast table at VMworld, attendees from places like Calgary, Little Rock and Charleston, S.C., remarked on how Ubuntu, Microsoft and Red Hat were barely visible at the show this year. Microsoft had a little booth I never succeeded in spotting; Red Hat had a 10-by-10 on the perimeter. It all suddenly seemed so obvious.

Continue reading "A Bolder, Brassier VMware Emerges From The Cloud..."

Ask someone what kind of desktop or laptop they own and they will most likely respond with the operating system name. And it used to be that if you asked about their smartphone, they would probably respond with the hardware name. But that may be changing.

Continue reading "Is The Smartphone The OS Or The Hardware?..."

Samsung announced on Thursday that they plan to focus their development efforts on Google's Android platform and their own Bada platform. Up until now, Samsung has been a solid partner of Microsoft's. They aren't leaving Windows Phone 7 behind, but they are only planning one device running Microsoft's new software. As for Symbian, don't count on it.

Continue reading "Samsung Picks Android, Windows Phone 7 Takes Hit..."

Tarmac, the iOS provisioning solution from Equinux, has added a security feature, while the next version of JAMF's Casper Suite will take advantage of the new management features in iOS4.

Continue reading "Equinux, JAMF Upgrade iPhone, iPad Provisioning Pl..."

Contractors deserve a voice in the series of upcoming TechStat review sessions the Office of Management and Budget has launched to fix high-risk IT projects across the federal government.

Continue reading "Let The Contractors In..."

New figures from Avira indicate that a healthy fear of the Web is making users more security-conscious if not yet more careful. Now's a good time to reinforce the lesson.

Continue reading "One-Thrd Of Users Fear The Whole Wide Web And Ever..."

In simple terms, Quality of Service (QoS) refers to the emotional opinions a customer develops from using a service. These personal hopes and opinions affect loyalty, retention, purchase decisions and the financial performance of your company. The easiest way to understand the emotions of Quality of Experience is to consider what customers say about a service.

Continue reading "Quality Of Service Isn't Quality Of Experience..."

If you drop in on Torelli Bicycle Co. headquarters in North Hollywood, Calif., these days, youll find CEO Todd Linscott and the rest of Team Torelli spending every spare moment reveling in their new "sandbox." This sandbox is no plaything, however. It's actually a very sophisticated test bed containing Torelli's critical business data, reconstructed on an SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Continue reading "SMB On Location Progress Report: Torelli in the "S..."

Fujitsu America has begun offering consulting services to help its customers promote green IT and cut their IT energy costs. While aimed at F500 types, the same tips apply to SMBs.

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The goal for VMware is to virtualize as much of the data center as possible. This goal can only be reached by increasing virtual machine (VM) density per physical server. The roadblock to high VM density per host is storage performance and data protection. Much of the focus of VMworld was addressing those issues through more vendors adopting the use of the vStorage API set.

Continue reading "vStorage API Spreads Its Wings..."

Starting today and continuing over the next few months, HP will be introducing new Pavilion and Envy notebooks and new Mini don't-call-them-netbooks. The Pavilion and Minis could appeal to many business travelers.

Continue reading "HP Announces New Notebooks, Netbooks..."

This has been a pretty big week for upcoming smartphone platforms. Microsoft announced today that Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturing on schedule. Palm has released the SDK for WebOS 2 and revealed quite a bit of info on the new platform. Finally, Apple today gave details on the 4.1 and 4.2 updates for iOS.

Continue reading "Microsoft Goes Gold, Apple and Palm Announce Updat..."

GWR Medical decided more than a year ago that instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to upgrade and maintain its own IT infrastructure supporting its wound care therapy business, it would instead pass the baton to Verizon. That's when GWR Medical made the move to the cloud.

Continue reading "Wound Care Goes ToThe Cloud..."

Drive-based threats may pose a larger risk to your business than drive-by attacks -- and USB drives may pose the largest threat of all.

Continue reading "USB And SMB Is A Risky Mix..."

Oracle's begun promoting the idea that the IT stack can become much more manageable, much less expensive, and much less complex if CIOs will simply go with all-Oracle stacks. While Oracle says this novel approach is starting to gain traction among customers, IBM senior VP Steve Mills says it's all a bunch of typical Oracle testosterone-driven blather.

Continue reading "IBM Exec Slams Oracle Over Customer Philosophy..."

While much attention is being paid to high end converged data center devices, many small and medium businesses still are searching for lower cost, higher performance network switches. In response, ADTRAN, which has been serving that market for 25 years, enhanced its 28-port Gigabit Ethernet switches, so they offer more bandwidth while reducing their size and power consumption.

Continue reading "ADTRAN Revamps Switch Line..."

Much has been made recently about the cost of Microsoft's licensing fees for Windows Phone 7 and how it is model out of sync with the realities of today. Android is open source and has no licensing fees, so why would anyone pay Microsoft up to $15 per Windows Phone license when you can pay $0 for Android?

Continue reading "Android Is Not Free..."

VMware isn't letting much moss accumulate under its feet as it continues expanding what it plans to do with its virtualization software portfolio. VMware executives have taken to expressing the expanding horizons of virtualization as a theme. They say they refer customers to "the journey," not one set of limited data center goals.

Continue reading "VMware Has More Of The Market Than IDC Figures Sho..."

Oracle, now the keeper of the Java flame through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has decided that Google has sullied Java through its modifications for the Android platform. For that, Google must pay, and it must pay Oracle. At least that's the way Oracle sees things.

Continue reading "Google Vs. Oracle: Microsoft Wins?..."

Very soon, the Internet and the TV will merge and technology companies will force media companies to adopt a more reasonable pricing scheme for entertainment content.

Continue reading "Watching The TV Wars..."

The latest Robert Rodriguez movie was made on an AMD-equipped server farm on the grounds of the old municipal airport in Austin, Texas.

Continue reading "AMD Servers Created Machete..."