Robert J. Mullins

SAN FRANCISCO€”Microsoft introduced the customer preview release of its Office 2013 productivity suite that introduces the concept of €œOffice as a service,€ noting that all of its features can be accessed via SkyDrive, its cloud storage service. €œThis is the first round of Office that was designed from the get-go for Office to be a […]

The environmental group Greenpeace has issued a report raising questions about Apple€™s commitment to using 100 percent renewable energy sources to power its facilities, particularly a new data center Apple opened in Maiden, N.C. Greenpeace rescored Apple€™s performance, updating an April analysis of the clean energy performance of Apple and several other companies, all of […]

Scores of companies have been promoting themselves as players in the enterprise social networking space of late, but they are not all created equal, with varying business models, approaches to the market and in some cases, a bit of a €œme-too€ eagerness. But amid the pretenders are serious contenders that bring a well-thought-out approach to […]

Microsoft is seeking to nurture startups with the creation of the Bing Fund, an angel investment fund targeted at companies developing online or mobile innovations. The Bing Fund will also serve as an incubator, giving fledgling companies support in a numbers of ways, including providing subsidized access to Bing application programming interfaces (APIs), advice from […]

Microsoft has issued a security advisory urging users to install an update that disables the Sidebar and Gadgets features on Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems due to a potential security vulnerability. The security advisory warns that a hacker could get into a user€™s system through an insecure Gadget running in Sidebar, execute arbitrary […]

Enterprise software vendor SAP announced pre-released second-quarter financial numbers July 12, showing a 7 percent profit increase, to $1.12 billion, on an 18 percent jump in revenue, to $4.8 billion, compared with the year-ago quarter. Company officials based the solid numbers in part on a strong showing for its HANA in-memory data analytics software. The […]

CapturetoCloud emerged from stealth mode July 11, offering what it calls a €œSocial Workspace€ collaboration platform for teams to share and work on a variety of content. The company has chosen to integrate with Google Apps over the collaboration offerings from Microsoft. €œWe generally saw the market as being largely a Microsoft-focused space where a […]

Cisco Systems says it will be the first networking vendor to deliver 1-gigabit-per-second speeds on enterprise wireless networks when it introduces an 802.11ac-based access point next year, but a few other things have to also happen before that actually means something. The 802.11ac WiFi standard, currently under development by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics […]

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner delivered a spirited pep talk to partners at a conference in Toronto July 11, showing how Microsoft is challenging them in several areas, including cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobile, workplace software and operating systems. With the various new products already introduced€“Office 365, Windows 7€”and those coming in the near […]

Microsoft€™s Windows Server 2012 will be released to manufacturers sometime in August and become generally available for sale in September, the company announced July 10. The software giant also detailed its plans to lure customers to its Hyper-V virtualization platform and away from industry leader VMware. On the second day of its Worldwide Partner Conference […]

Cloud service and application hosting provider Rackspace is going to announce its support for the upcoming Windows Server 2012 enterprise operating system at Microsoft€™s World Partner Conference beginning July 9 in Toronto. While other cloud providers are expected to support Windows Server 2012 as well, Rackspace€™s offering differs from that of other providers, such as […]

Microsoft said it is acquiring Perceptive Pixel, a six-year-old company involved in the research, development and production of large-scale, multi-touch display solutions. Perceptive Pixel, also referred to as PPI, is the technology behind those large wall-sized displays that anchors on CNN use to show maps of the United States and identify which states are turning […]