Market Watch: News

Companies in search of workers with the most sought-after IT skills may be better off investing in training programs for current workers than hiring new employees, according to IDC

In 2011 Gartner's Jim Sinur predicted that business process management and the cloud would be the "real thunder." He stated that moving operations to the cloud would free up money and efforts for businesses, and those organizations would be remiss to ignore BPM.

A boutique system builder has bucked the industry trend of slumping PC sales by continuing to focus on selling Windows 7 machines.

Microsoft has gotten next to nothing from its $300 million investment in Barnes & Noble, analysts said, but it may reap some rewards as it prepares to ship smaller tablets.

About half of the world's companies will adopt BYOD programs by 2017 and will no longer provide computing devices to employees, a new Gartner report predicts.

A strong stock market could open the floodgates for more tech IPOs in the wake of Friday's solid debut of Marketo and Tableau, but not all segments of IT may be able to ride the wave.

Google beat Apple to the music subscription service punch this week, perhaps the doing of record labels who wanted to put Apple in its place, an analyst said

E-commerce trade group NetChoice takes aim at state legislation -- and at open access and privacy advocates -- in the newest list of bills it deems would be awful for the Internet.

Can the old guard in business continuity and disaster-recovery services thrive in an era when the companies are looking at new ways to process business data? SunGard Data Systems, with decades of experience in availability services, is feeling the pinch as some business clientele move data to the cloud. But SunGard says it's pushing forward with innovations that are making it a public cloud provider as well with the kind of application availability it says will be hard to match elsewhere.

Dell drastically cut the online price of its Windows RT tablet, reducing the price by $US200 to $US299.99 for Dell XPS 10.

Treasurer Wayne Swan's sixth budget may well be his last. But it certainly had some highlights although most analysts agree that it didn't offer a great deal to Australian economy. The following stories offer a broad-based, ICT-centric coverage of the budget.

Australia's second-biggest telco, Optus, has suffered a 7.5 per cent slump in net profit for the year to March 31.

Microsoft today took another shot at rival Google, calling its rival's online application suite, Google Docs, "too big a gamble."

The combination of highly virtualised environments inside enterprise networks, along with an explosion of mobile traffic, are exposing the limitations of existing networks, and driving the need for a new era of dynamic and scalable networks of the future, IDC researchers said in a panel discussion at Interop this week.

Electronics manufacturer, Acer Australia, is offering complimentary one-year accidental damage protection on all notebooks and tablets purchased between May 8 and August 31.

Nvidia will stay on board with making Tegra ARM-based processors for Windows RT tablets despite sluggish early sales of the devices, making the same commitment that Qualcomm has made, an Nvidia executive said

Apple analyst has revealed that he believes that Apple’s fortunes may be about to change for the better thanks to the raft of new products it intends to launch over the next few months.

Cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is for renting storage and compute capacity from a service provider, delivered via an Internet connection. Similarly, software as a service (SaaS) is for accessing applications that are hosted in the cloud.

Data -- whether it is defined as "big" or "little" -- exists everywhere, and effective use of it does not have to be confined only to the largest companies with the biggest budgets and most sophisticated IT staff. In essence, it's not the size of the data, but how you use it that really matters.

Microsoft has gotten little from a 2012 investment of $US300 million with Barnes & Noble, analysts said, but it's poised to reap some rewards as it and its partners start to ship smaller tablets.