Daily Tech Briefing: May 14, 2014

Blackberry already offers an enterprise mobility management solution that allows customers to manage BlackBerry smartphones alongside iOS and Android-running devices. Now, the company has announced that its EMM will also enable its competitors—AirWatch, Citrix, IBM and SAP—to also support BlackBerry 10 devices with their mixed-platform environments.

As for a time frame when the four companies will begin supporting BB10 devices, John Sims, president of Global Enterprise Services at BlackBerry, told eWEEK the company is “working actively” to enable them to implement the support for the APIs that are being opened to them.

Microsoft has been urging users to apply the Windows 8.1 update to their systems, or risk missing out on future security updates. Company officials explained that they have extended the timeframe for enterprise customers to employ updates from 30 to 120 days, making the new deadline June 10.

The update has enhancements designed to make keyboard and mouse users feel comfortable. For example, hovering the cursor over the top area of a modern Windows app will show the familiar close and minimize controls.

IBM recently announced “IBM ExperienceOne,” which is a portfolio of cloud-based and on-premise solutions designed to help users provide deeper customer engagements through a combination of marketing, sales and services capabilities. The portfolio also utilizes consulting, agency and system integration services from the IBM Interactive Experience practice.

Finally, Nvidia’s mobile chip Tegra K1 was introduced at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in January. Now, the company’s CEO has announced that the chip could make its way into low-power dense servers. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated that even though the 192-GPU core processor is being aimed for use in products in the automotive and gaming industries, there is interest from data center system vendors as well, particularly when it comes to using the chip in microservers.

Microservers are low-power systems that are highly dense and designed to run large numbers of small workloads. They are found in hyperscale data centers run by companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.