Stories by: Jon Brodkin

Backup-power product maker APC and building automation vendor TAC will integrate their software management platforms with IBM's Tivoli Monitoring energy management tools, giving data center managers more visibility into and control over their systems, the company said Friday.

VMware boosted its application performance management capabilities and gained R&D facilities in Israel Wednesday with the acquisition of B-hive. VMware, which is owned by EMC but run as an independent company, has made nine acquisitions over the past three years aimed at improving the security, management and services tied to its virtualization offerings. Here's a quick look at each purchase:

SAP has eliminated one of its lower-priced support offerings, but at the same time expanded ERP maintenance levels to include 24/7 support and support for third-party systems that connect to SAP software.

Unisys is releasing several virtualization services and its first server based AMD processors, the company announced Wednesday.

HP released a new ProLiant blade enclosure Wednesday with higher server densities designed for cloud computing and other computing-intensive applications.

VMware has agreed to acquire B-hive Networks, an application performance management software vendor, the company announced Wednesday.

For all the flexibility server virtualization affords today's IT departments, there's one type of flexibility IT managers would love to have but aren't likely to get: the ability to save money on Microsoft software licenses. Even when carving a physical server into multiple virtual machines, customers using virtualization probably won't find any way to circumvent the licensing terms set by Microsoft for software running on virtual machines, Forrester analyst Christopher Voce said at Forrester's IT Forum last week.

VMware's going to win the virtualization battle, and Microsoft won't even be its nearest competitor.

EMC held its huge annual show for customers, analysts and reporters this week. Here are 10 things we learned.

EMC executives predict flash storage technology will be nearly as inexpensive as high-end disk drives within two years. Most disk drives will continue to offer lower prices than flash, though, ensuring a long life for disk technology, it said.

EMC unveiled new products and features for data backup at EMC World in Las Vegas this week, including data de-duplication upgrades and a new "spin down" technology that automatically puts idle disk drives into sleep mode.