Chris Preimesberger

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s pretty hard to beat free of charge in any business, and it’s even harder when two good things come at no cost. At VMWorld 2013 on Aug. 28, backup and archiving specialist Unitrends came out with a double-whammy freebie offer. The Columbia, S.C.-based company released a free edition of its Unitrends […]

There’s now more evidence that due to big data workloads popping up all over the map, IT management software originally designed for large IT systems is trickling down to the midrange—and smaller—enterprise. PernixData, a specialist in developing server-side management software for NAND flash media, on Aug. 27 released a new edition of its flash hypervisor […]

Upstart Starcounter, a small Swedish company that competes with the Oracles and SAPs of the world with its speedy, big data in-memory database, released the beta of its 2.0 version on Aug. 21. The Stockholm-based company made the announcement at the NoSQL Now! show in San Jose, Calif. The next-generation NoSQL database features a Web […]

Cloud service storage and collaboration provider Box has announced that it is doubling its personal offering to include 10GB of free storage and launching an all-new starter plan for small businesses that offers 100GB for $5 per month per user.Box hopes the new plans make it more of an inducement for small businesses and consumers […]

Imation, which has branched out far beyond its tape storage beginnings, on Aug. 19 unveiled a new Nexsan NST unified hybrid storage platform to go with NestOS 3.0, a highly scalable, flexible storage operating system. The new NST6000 platform adds Fibre Channel support and can handle big data SAN and NAS workloads with improved performance, […]

New-gen converged data center software provider SimpliVity on Aug. 19 launched the second version of its OmniCube IT infrastructure system, which runs on standard x86-based servers. An OmniCube is a 2U rack-mounted system that aggregates the functions of server, storage and networking into a much smaller footprint. In addition, OmniCube features advanced functionality that otherwise […]

How does a highly successful, global market-leading company such as Cisco Systems justify cutting 4,000 of its 66,000-plus employees–a rather large chunk of its workforce–when the company is doing just fine financially? While that personnel move looks preposterous, this is not a simple question to answer. While shareholders and analysts are looking at past and […]

A corporate judge Aug. 16 denied a request by billionaire investor Carl Icahn to expedite his lawsuit challenging Michael Dell’s effort to take his own company private. The lawsuit sought to prevent changing the conditions of CEO Dell’s current $24.4 billion bid ($13.75 per share) to buy the company. Dell’s proposal of $13.75 goes into […]

Deploying Enterprise APIs for an Interconnected World: 10 Best Practices by Chris Preimesberger Have a Clear API Strategy The enterprise should have a clear idea and plan about what it wants to achieve with its API program and build it out into defined steps. Enterprises can use APIs in myriad ways, and not just for […]

Dell, facing increasing pressure from both the markets and its shareholders, moved up its scheduled quarterly earnings disclosure five days to Aug. 15 to report flat year-over-year revenue and a sharp drop in profit. The Round Rock, Texas-based computer hardware, software and services provider offered no insight because it canceled its regular conference call for […]

Facebook, which like any enterprise is on perpetual lookout for ways to monetize products and services, is preparing to sidestep a longtime partner, PayPal, in order to add a potentially lucrative income stream: its own mobile payment service. Facebook is developing a payment feature that would enable members to make purchases via selected mobile apps […]

Cisco Systems lifted more than a few eyebrows Aug. 14 when during its quarterly earnings call it revealed plans to lay off about 4,000 employees, or 5 percent of its workforce, in the next 12 months as part of an impending restructuring.The layoff news was not dictated by current income or profitability numbers. The San […]