Robert J. Mullins

In a sense, the question of the day is not whether Microsoft is going to acquire the enterprise social media provider Yammer, but what took them so long? Rumors began circulating June 14 that Microsoft would be acquiring Yammer, a 4-year-old business social media company with 200,000 companies as customers, for a total of 4 […]

SANTA CLARA, CALIF.€”There€™s a lot that businesses still have to ask their cloud service providers before signing up for service, especially about how secure their cloud environment is, the chief operations officer of the Cloud Security Alliance said at a cloud conference here. John Howie explained the security risks associated with cloud computing and the […]

MapR, which delivers its own version of the Apache Hadoop distribution for crunching big data, is unveiling version 2.0 of its product at the 2012 Hadoop Summit June 13 and 14 in San Jose, Calif., where it will also announce that a cloud version of its applications will be available through Amazon Web Services (AWS). […]

Cisco Systems has introduced a portfolio of equipment, software and services to address the performance challenges that enterprises face when they try to adopt cloud computing in their IT organizations. At its Cisco Live user conference June 12 in San Diego, executives of the networking giant unveiled the Cisco Cloud Connected Solution, which they said […]

A new survey of CEOs and chief information security officers (CISOs) finds that they have vastly different perspectives and concerns regarding security threats. Security professionals and chief executives also differ in their views about how the threat of a cyber-attack can impact their company networks or overall business. The June 12 survey, done by Research […]

Cisco Systems, the networking industry leader that others are looking to for guidance on its software-defined networking strategy, introduced a development platform for creating software applications that control networking hardware to run more efficiently. The Cisco Open Network Environment Platform Kit, which the company dubbed “onePK,” is delivered through a rich set of platform APIs, […]

The Microsoft announcement that Internet Explorer will be the only browser choice on some Windows RT devices brought a howl of protest from one browser rival, Mozilla, but Microsoft faces a much different market than when it gave away Internet Explorer for free to crush Netscape Navigator in the browser war of the 1990s. Microsoft […]

HTC, the Taiwanese electronics company, has been denied the opportunity to release some of the first tablets running Microsoft€™s Windows 8 because its sales have weakened. Bloomberg News reported on the Microsoft decision June 6, the same day Taiwan-based HTC reported its second quarter revenue would be off by 13 percent after its first quarter […]

Microsoft has provided greater technical details about the upgrades to Windows Azure, which the company says makes it an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as well as a platform as a service (PaaS). Developers, system administrators and other IT professionals were given a deep dive into Azure€™s new services via a Webcast the afternoon of […]

Google Maps Event Google Maps invited a number of journalists to its offices in San Francisco June 6 to see a preview of some new features it’s adding in the coming months. Tough Questions About Google and Apple Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Maps, faced persistent questions about reports that Apple was […]

VMware is repostioning Socialcast as an enterprise social networking platform with what the virtualization company considers a competitive pricing system. Specifically, VMware customers will get a full-featured version of the product free for up to 50 users. With this new go-to-market approach, introduced on June 6, VMware is looking to compete in the expanding field […]

SAN FRANCISCO €” Google unveiled new features of Google Maps June 6. But during a demonstration of the new Maps features at a media briefing here, a Google executive deflected questions about Google Maps’ future on the Apple iOS mobile operating system. New features that are coming include 3D maps of major cities, a version […]