Stories by: Denise Dubie

The 1979 film "When a Stranger Calls" portrayed the terror-filled night of a young woman fielding prank and increasingly threatening calls that climaxed when the police determined "the calls are coming from inside the house." Today IT security executives experience a similar chill down their spine when they realize the biggest threat they face comes from internal security attacks and data breaches.

Microsoft's release this week of Hyper-V means there's one more hypervisor in the game -- and one more reason management capabilities will play a large part in determining which vendor will win long-term customer favor by providing the tools to optimize virtual server environments.

Virtual systems management vendor Veeam Software Tuesday announced it had acquired for an undisclosed amount a company called Nworks that makes software enabling HP and Microsoft products to separately manage VMware virtual servers. (Read our Q&A with VMware CEO Diane Greene.)

IT professionals may initially be awestruck by the promises of virtualization, but Gartner analysts warn that awe could turn into upset when organizations start to suffer from seven nasty side effects.

Managing virtual environments became a dominant theme at a Gartner conference this week, and start-up Embotics took the opportunity to launch the second generation of its policy-based management tool that the vendor says tracks virtual machines throughout their entire life cycle.

HP this week at Software Universe offered details about how it plans to build out its software and services business. Here are 10 things we learned that show us HP is serious about software.

HP kept talk of its pending acquisition of IT services vendor EDS to a controlled minimum this week as company executives briefly addressed customer inquiries about the US$13.9 billion deal.

HP Wednesday announced an expanded partnership with VMware to jointly develop software to manage VMware hypervisor technology.

HP's motto when it comes to overhauling data centers is anything we can do, we can help you to do - only better with HP hardware, software and services.

HP this week unveiled new automation capabilities and tighter integration work across technologies the company acquired with Mercury Interactive, Opsware and Bristol Technology. HP took the wraps off its product enhancements in Las Vegas, where the company is hosting its Technology Forum & Expo and Software Universe conferences.

HP introduces increased automation capabilities and advanced integration across multiple applications in three major software suites.