Technology Industry Archive

Cisco, known primarily as a networking equipment vendor, is hoping to establish an early beachhead in “unified communications,” a market it believes will grow to $34 billion, with a flurry of new products for desktops, conference rooms and data centers it introduced today at the VoiceCon conference. Broadly speaking, unified communications involves merging email, IM and Web...

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IBM’s Open Cloud Manifesto, an attempt to create technical standards for Web-based computer services, has been received with a great deal of suspicion in some circles, and with good reason. While IBM is trying to project itself as the grown-up in the discussion, many observers see the manifesto as opening a new front in Big Blue’s decades-long death-struggle with Microsoft. IBM is...

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Apple sued over iPhone e-book connection — What would a tech court week be without Apple suing or being sued? In this case, it’s the latter, but not another class action. No, this time the Swiss-based MONEC is screaming because Apple is distributing applications that allow an iPhone to display e-books, and the company claims that it patented the concept. Of course, given that the...

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Back in February, I wrote about an Accenture study finding that telecom carriers were out of touch with customers and losing money as a result. The consulting firm also did a much broader study and — surprise, surprise — high tech firms are often having their enterprise lunch handed to them … by themselves. Accenture’s study was of multiple industries, but at my request they...

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SAP is fighting its own legacy and is, in some ways, running away from its strengths as it tries to increase revenues during difficult economic times. SAP’s legacy is mixed. Known for selling enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, comprehensive, industry-specific suites that produce reports culled from data from all parts of the organization, it is equally known for delays in...

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Dell, HP, Lenovo and other hardware vendors could be looking at the end of their PC businesses within four years, as enterprises start implementing a more network-based approach to delivering computing power and applications. The threat comes from a technology known as hosted virtual desktops, based on software and networking tools that allow all the data that currently resides within a PC to...

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Smell the hint of smoke in the air? It actually started when Microsoft announced that a full multi-touch interface would be built into Windows 7. But it’s now getting thick as the company posted a fuller description of the new interface, which includes not only single-touch, but multi-touch features. Providing the other half of the friction is Apple’s recently-granted broad patent...

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Microsoft is stuck with an intractable issue that no amount of rationalization will remedy. Through a series of ill-considered acquisitions in the early years of this decade, the company finds itself stuck with four software products that essentially perform the same functions, but which it can’t whittle down to a more manageable number (like one) without risking relationships with key...

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When outsourcing consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas released its figures on job cuts in January and February, the numbers were depressing, with the two months figure almost double the same period in 2008 and close to the number of job cuts in the first six months of last year. But the picture is much worse for high tech, with layoffs in January and February almost quadruple those in...

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The next item on the list for Salesforce.com is marketing automation, an executive told me yesterday. The company currently makes on-demand software that lets salespeople manage leads, and recently set its sights on call center technology, as I reported yesterday. But while Salesforce sees huge growth potential in the call center market, it is still fighting skepticism about its future...

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