Communications integrator, NEC, is on course to become a major ICT service provider after snapping up CSG’s Technology Solutions division.

CSG (ASX: CSV) has agreed to sell its Technology Solutions business to NEC Australia for around $227.5 million

Belief in OpenFlow-based software-defined networking is coalescing rapidly, the latest evidence being the overflow crowds at last week's Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., and new details about a Cisco startup that has been formed to address the opportunity.

During his keynote speech at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara on Tuesday, Google executive Urs Holzle detailed the company's work with software-defined networking (SDN) from its earliest stages.

Toshiba said Tuesday it will purchase IBM's retail point-of-sale (POS) business for US$850 million, with the Japanese company taking over the hardware business while IBM shifts its focus to back-end software solutions.

Cisco, Juniper, HP and nine other technology companies have joined forces with two leading universities to form a research center focused on software-defined networking (SDN).

NEC has begun sales of new software to quickly find video clips in large archives, which is well-suited for finding illegal content on video sharing websites, it said Tuesday.

NTT DoCoMo said Monday a planned joint venture with Samsung Electronics, Fujitsu, NEC and other Japanese companies to design and sell chips for high-speed mobile networks based on the LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard has been abandoned.

It seems like all phones and all tablets do all things for all people these days. Every single smartphone and touch tablet has become just about everything anyone could ever want in a mobile device.

With so much chatter about tablets this year, you might think that the handheld, rectangular devices being unveiled represent a significant innovation. The reality is that so much of what we're seeing is not a whole lot different than what we saw in previous years; these products offer only a few new twists. But those new twists could make the difference between tablets' remaining a niche item and their finally busting out to the mass market in a meaningful way.

It seems as if we've been writing about USB 3.0 forever, but it has really been only about two years since Intel and other parties formed a promotional group for USB 3.0 in 2007. The spec was completed in November 2008, at which time the standard's backers said that a glut of devices would hit the market late this year. Well, that statement turned out to be almost right: Devices are coming very soon, but the glut won't be until next year.

There are few people in the IT industry that would gloat about servicing a company of less than 50 people to their global peers. There are even fewer that would do it for a 10-seat operation. But in reality, the SMB market is the backbone of the Australian economy and deserves its time in the spotlight.