Enterprise

EMC has extended from June 29 to July 10 the deadline on its US$1.8 billion offer to purchase all outstanding shares of storage backup vendor Data Domain, in an effort to entice Data Domain to abandon a deal with NetApp.

Internet search engines and software applications can catalog huge volumes of information, but they aren't smart enough to trace personal relationships between people, according to the executive chairman of World-Check, a company that maintains a database of individuals that banks and other companies might want to think twice about doing business with.

Microsoft is readying its next major release of the Windows operating system. After months of demos, early testing, beta releases, and finally announced launch plans, here's what you can expect in an upgrade.

Government agencies looking to save money by using software with no up-front purchase cost should fully consider the long-term expenditures for using those products, a new report said.

Web 2.0 is a set of technologies, a huge set of related functionality and almost a lifestyle choice. This straight-up, non-techie tutorial will help you separate the facts from the hype.

The combination of innovative IT and a cooperative orientation toward vendors leads directly to better vendor performance and firm profitability.

IT managers should know the basics of how e-mail gets from sender to recipient, and what can delay or prevent its arrival.

Supply Chain Mangement topics covering definition, objectives, solutions and the impact of globalisation.

John Costello investigates how government organisations at all levels are using portal technology in a variety of ways to meet the needs of their communities.

Last year the experts were telling businesses:"If you can get your company to join the new economy, you may reap big rewards". Then came April's NASDAQ showers, and May's flowers still aren't blooming. So what's happening where bricks meet clicks?

My last one-on-one interview featured a coding cowboy's successful fast-draw approach to service-oriented architecture. But that's not the only maverick approach in innovative IT shops. At Deutsche Bank in New York, John Stepper is doing the SOA equivalent of changing an engine while the car is running.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered the keynote speech at his company's London conference "Technologies to Change Your Business: How Customers Are Implementing Tomorrow's Strategies Today".

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

For all the talk of businesses embracing Web 2.0 and social software tools, most companies are still at the very early stages of adoption, says Jonathan Yarmis, an analyst at AMR Research who focuses on emerging technologies. In his latest research note on companies taking their first step into social media, he says that companies must avoid the "Kumbaya Zone" - the place where social media is ultimately a time-waster and has little business value.

Where you come down on that question depends a great deal on how you think most IT organizations will consume cloud services. How will IT organizations achieve an infrastructure that scales easily, can be reconfigured in minutes rather than weeks, and has a transparent cost based on usage?

Bernard Golden has picked apart the arguments against cloud computing. Cloud's not perfect yet, but make no mistake, he says: When security and productivity come into conflict, productivity always prevails. You can't ignore cloud any more than you can ignore virtualization.

Think far beyond your servers from the start if you want to reap virtualization's wider potential in the data center, says Dave Robbins, CTO, Information Technology for NetApp. Here's his starting checklist for IT pros who want to take a holistic view of virtualization in the enterprise.

Cloud's too hard and too costly to manage? No, says Bernard Golden, as he tackles the last of five key concerns about cloud computing in the enterprise.