Daily Tech Briefing: July 17, 2014

In a surprise pairing, Apple and IBM are teaming up to develop applications and sell smartphones together. The tech giants plan to create easy-to-use business apps and deploy them on iPhones and iPads for enterprise users around the globe—where Android devices are currently king.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with CNBC that this is a historic deal that is all about transforming the enterprise. He added that the two companies have been working to develop this partnership for about two years. IBM Chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty added that the deal means growth for both companies.

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2014, the company launched a new Vertical ISV Partnership Program for partners and also announced that several key partners are using Microsoft technology to create interesting apps and technologies.

Corporate Vice President of Developer Platform & Evangelism and chief evangelist for Microsoft, Steven Guggenheimer, told eWEEK that many of Microsoft’s key partners – like Viggle, Trend Micro, Epicor and Work In Field—are leading the way in building innovative apps with Microsoft technologies such as Windows, Windows Phone 8 and Microsoft Azure.

According to statistics released by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the volume of new and renewal prescriptions sent electronically has increased 13-fold from 2008 through 2013.

The data for the analysis came from Surescripts, an e-prescription network used by the majority of all community pharmacies in the U.S. for routing prescriptions, excluding closed systems. Minnesota, Wisconsin and Massachusetts were the states found to be leading the pack when it comes to e-prescribing.

Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft have all been lowering their rates for online storage for several years. Now, Box and Microsoft are offering common business customers unlimited cloud storage for the price of subscribing to the Microsoft Office 365 cloud service. The subscription fees range from $5 to $15 per user per month for small, medium and mid-size businesses.