Integration and Services: News

Citrix ended its Synergy'13 conference on a high note, with a partner appreciation party that included drinks, food and a performance by popular band, Maroon 5. The band swooned the women (and some of the men) with their top hits, leaving everyone wanting for more by the end of the night. Warning - there may be one too many pictures of frontman, Adam Levine.

The U.S. government is in negotiations with SoftBank for greater control over equipment purchases by Sprint Nextel and the selection of one of the Japanese company's nominee to the U.S. carrier's board, according to a news report.

Verizon Wireless is partnering with singer and actress Jennifer Lopez in creating a USretail distribution company that will offer Verizon's devices in stores and online destinations designed to appeal to Latino consumers.

Citrix Systems is making its cloud-based storage service ShareFile more Microsoft-friendly with SharePoint integration and the ability to store data on Azure.

The founder of live video social network, Kondoot.com, Mark Cracknell, in partnership with Mark Smith, have launched a digital signature platform called SignForms.com.

Sprint Nextel has increased its offer to buy out Clearwire, bidding US$3.40 per share, to counter a competing offer by Dish Network.

Sprint Nextel said it had received permission from SoftBank to negotiate a rival acquisition offer from Dish Network.

Application networking provider, A10 Networks, is on the hunt for more resellers in the Australian market.

Newvem, which sells a tool that allows users to track and optimize their use of cloud computing resources, has expanded its software's functionality to monitor not just Amazon Web Services, but now Microsoft Azure now as well.

Cloud email security and hosting vendor, SMX, has made some significant investments hiring Mark Wilson as its new Australian country manager and opening offices in Sydney and Melbourne.

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.

Treasurer Wayne Swan’s 2013 Budget does not fully support the ICT sector or investment in ICT required to drive productivity and competitiveness, according to advisory firm, Grant Thornton.

Facing fierce competition in the market for cloud services, hosting provider Rackspace has pledged to help its users debug the programs they'll run on Rackspace's OpenStack platform.

Resellers are becoming more interested and involved in Cloud services, according to leading distributor, Ingram Micro which has seen a surge in the uptake of its Cloud services products.

IT&T recruitment company, Talent International launched a loyalty rewards program for its contractors at its Unleashed event in Sydney.

ICT services and solutions vendor, Dimension Data (DiData), has fully acquired privately owned Australian managed security services provider (MSSP), earthwave Corporation.

Samsung has built several different Galaxy S4 smartphones, including a U.S. version running a Snapdragon processor that requires an extra image processor to enable heavily promoted user functions such as eye-movement recognition.

Telecommunications provider, AT&T, has extended its partnership with IT, consulting and outsourcing company, Wirpo, to create machine-to-machine (M2M) development services and systems integration across all major industries.

Global IT services provider, Pactera, is setting up its first Australian Nearshore Development Centre, based in the University of Wollongong’s Innovation Campus precinct.

Specialist SAP consulting and technical services provider, Plaut IT Australia, has acquired Malaysian-based offshore service provider, Baseliner, for an undisclosed sum.