Stories by: Robert Mullins

With its picture gracing the cover of Time's November 12 "Best Inventions of 2007" issue, the iPhone is undisputed as a technology product that matters to consumers. These days in IT that can mean only one thing -- the enterprise is its destiny.

Oracle is going after its piece of the hot virtualization market by introducing an open source Xen-based hypervisor to compete against those from Novell, Red Hat and VMware.

Red Hat is updating its Linux-based server operating system and offering a number of other related improvements aimed at helping the company assume a leadership role in enterprise computing. The enhancements include support for software appliances, improved virtualization, and a partnership with Amazon's compute "in the cloud" service that lets companies tap additional computing capacity on demand via the Web and access software-as-a service offerings.

XAware, a provider of commercial data integration software, is now going the open source route, introducing the latest version of its product, XAware 5, under the GPL v2 license.

Sun has filed a countersuit against rival Network Appliance over patent infringement allegations regarding network storage management software.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said Tuesday, in a swipe at rival Google, that his company does not have any plans to bid on wireless spectrum in January, because being a wireless carrier goes beyond its core competency.

By developing a version of its open source desktop Firefox Web browser to run on mobile devices, Mozilla hopes to break the hold some handset makers and carriers have on what mobile applications consumers can use, an executive of the company says.

Oracle has released a database driver free to the open source community that improves retrieval of data from Oracle databases for Web applications developed using PHP.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says Red Hat Linux uses intellectual property owned by Microsoft and that Red Hat's customers should pay Microsoft for it.

Azul Systems, secured US$40 million in new financing Thursday just as the provider of Java "network-attached processing" servers was laying off employees and reading media speculation that it was looking for a buyer.

The Internet needs a massive investment to keep up with the demands of YouTube fans, billions of e-mails and wireles access, a university study states.