Software: Interviews

John Swainson has one of the more challenging jobs in the tech industry right now. As president of Dell's software division, he's charged with sorting through all the software Dell has acquired and organizing it into coherent offerings that can further its effort to become a more profitable, software- and services-driven company.

As co-president of Oracle, Mark Hurd is tasked with selling an ever-increasing array of new software and hardware products, such as the Exadata database machine and Fusion Applications, while figuring out how to keep the company's vast installed base happy and fending off competition from the likes of SAP.

Since its introduction, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface has created a fair amount of controversy. UEFI was created through an industry consortium as an evolutionary step up from BIOS, the simple firmware long used when starting a computer to initialize all the components and load the operating system. Among its advanced features, UEFI includes an option called Secure Boot, which requires that any software used before the operating system starts, or after it shuts down, has been signed by a certificate authority.

NetSuite is one of the SaaS (software as a service) market's pioneers, having sold its growing family of ERP (enterprise resource planning), e-commerce and other applications since 1998. The vendor's results have been beating Wall Street's predictions, and may yet again in a few weeks, when NetSuite is expected to announce its fourth-quarter and year-end results.

Jim Whitehurst says it's not just Red Hat's products, but its philosophy that place it at the forefront of cloud computing

For most people who identify themselves as techies, Tesla's Model S is something of a dream car. The all-electric vehicle accelerates fast, can maintain a high top speed, has a range of up to 300 miles, and packs a 17-inch flat panel display with a Linux-based computer system that provides access to just about every aspect of the car's performance and entertainment system.

MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor's big interest these days is "the mobile wave," which refers to a re-ordering of technology and modern life through the proliferation of iPads, smartphones and the increasingly sophisticated software that runs on them.

Bill McMurray recently took up the managing director role at CA Technologies. ARN caught up with him to examine his plans for the company and the year ahead

Following last year's merger with Activant Solutions, ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor Epicor is closing in on US$1 billion in revenue, a figure that belies the vendor's relatively low profile compared to giants such as Oracle and SAP.

Mobile security concerns about bring-your-own devices are overblown, says an IT security expert in this CIO.com Q&A.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is coming up on his five-year anniversary at the helm, following his arrival in December 2007. Under Whitehurst's leadership, Red Hat's revenue has grown from US$523 million in its fiscal 2008 to more than $1.1 billion in its fiscal 2012, without deviating from its core strategy of open-source infrastructure software.

Day two at Microsoft TechEd 2012 was all about Windows 8. CIO.com caught up with Windows corporate VP Antoine Leblond, who discussed why CIOs should test Windows 8, why developers should love it, and why we'll all be touching our laptop screens sooner than we think.

Oracle president Mark Hurd has pledged to "make it easier" for customers to do business with the company.

IT management software vendor, SolarWinds, is about to introduce its latest Synthetic End User Monitor (SEUM) which supports Real User Monitors (RUM) to monitor networks. The company also most recently opened up a new head office, based in Brisbane. SolarWinds senior vice-president and general manager of the Asia-Pacific, Doug Hibberd, spoke to ARN about the company’s achievements, latest product release and future plans.

With the rapid evolution of technology and the gradual expansion of Australia’s NBN, significant developments are taking place in areas such as the digital delivery of medical service. Hot on the heels of CSC’s acquisition of iSoft, ARN spoke to CSC Australia national director for health services, Lisa Pettigrew, on what lies ahead for eHealth in Australia.

TrackITOnline's Phil Lancaster, talks about running a niche distribution company and its future plans

Google shook the search market last week with the launch of Instant, a new feature that lets the company's search engine refresh results on the fly as people type their queries.

Calling itself the 21st century distributor, NewLease is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) specialist with a sole focus on the service provider community. It facilitates and implements SaaS or subscription licensing models in Australia, New Zealand and India. Company chief Doug Tutus said the company - which was initially established as a service provider - is well placed to attack the SaaS market, having positioned itself early in the game and fine-tuned its expertise. JENNIFER O'BRIEN reports.

To some, 13 is an unlucky number. In fact, there are people are so frightened by it that the fear of 13 has been given a name – Triskaidekaphobia. Express Data is not Triskaidekaphobic. Now in its 13th year of trading under its current name, the company has sailed itself through the global financial crisis with a steady hand, and emerged on the other side as ARN’s Software Distributor of the Year for 2009.

CIOs think of Symantec as a company that buys its way into new markets. Over the past decade the Cupertino, California, vendor has snatched up about 30 companies as it's evolved from an antivirus and tools seller to an aspiring enterprise infrastructure vendor.