News

• No big-bang Apps news at I/O, but some announcements merit attention

  By Juan Carlos Perez | 17 May, 2013 23:57

  Apps, Google's flagship product for enterprise IT, had a minor presence at this week's I/O developer conference, but some announcements at the show and in prior weeks deserve attention from customers of the cloud email and collaboration suite.

• Wall Street Beat: Market stokes tech IPOs, as Tableau and Marketo debut

  By Marc Ferranti and Joab Jackson | 17 May, 2013 21:17

  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.

• Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox

  By John Ribeiro | 17 May, 2013 05:35

  Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in the Beta version of Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."

• Tibco offers free R to the enterprise

  By Joab Jackson | 16 May, 2013 22:13

  Hoping to entice more enterprises to use the R statistical programming language directly within their predictive modeling and data visualization jobs, Tibco has released a free version of its R runtime engine.

• Jive Software adds integration tool for its enterprise social platform

  By Juan Carlos Perez | 16 May, 2013 20:37

  Jive Software has released an add-on to its enterprise social networking (ESN) software that automates and simplifies the process of integrating Jive's suite with third-party systems.

• SAP builds out HANA platform and ecosystem

  By Chris Kanaracus | 16 May, 2013 18:35

  Anyone remotely within the orbit of SAP lately knows that its number-one focus is the HANA in-memory database and development platform. At this week's Sapphire conference in Orlando, the vendor sought to show the progress it is making in both building out HANA's capabilities as well as attracting developers and partners to HANA.

• Amazon gives DynamoDB a performance boost

  By Mikael Ricknäs | 16 May, 2013 10:28

  Amazon Web Services is improving the performance of its DynamoDB database service with Parallel Scan, which gives users faster access to their tables.

• SAP updates line-of-business cloud apps

  By Chris Kanaracus | 15 May, 2013 17:26

  Selling SaaS (software as a service) applications aimed at specific lines of business is one way that SAP has tried to stake a claim in the world of cloud computing and during the Sapphire conference it unveiled a broad series of updates to the portfolio.

• SAP unveils 'consumer-friendly' Fiori app suite

  By Chris Kanaracus | 15 May, 2013 14:28

  SAP's software is known for its role running many of the world's largest companies, but not necessarily for its user-friendliness. As part of an ongoing effort to change this perception, SAP unveiled Fiori, a set of 25 lightweight "consumer-friendly" applications that can run on desktops, tablets and mobile devices, on Wednesday at the Sapphire conference in Orlando.

• Mozilla to Firefox: 'Browser, heal thyself'

  By Gregg Keizer | 15 May, 2013 10:54

  Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox 21, adding more social media connections, tweaking the Do Not Track privacy setting and rolling out a new tool that long term, aims to create a self-healing browser.

• Salesforce.com adds central file view to Chatter mobile app

  By Juan Carlos Perez | 14 May, 2013 23:42

  Salesforce.com wants to simplify the way mobile users find, access and share files from its Chatter enterprise social networking (ESN) application.

• Windows 8 app store fails Top 10 test

  By Gregg Keizer | 14 May, 2013 18:05

  Microsoft's Windows 8 app store failed a test touted by a former Microsoft manager and distinguished engineer as a way to determine an ecosystem's relevance.

• NetSuite to increase focus on ERP for manufacturers

  By Chris Kanaracus | 14 May, 2013 17:03

  Capitalizing on apparent demand from customers, NetSuite is adding new capabilities aimed at manufacturers to its cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

• SAP says HANA will power all Cloud applications

  By Chris Kanaracus | 14 May, 2013 14:19

  SAP's HANA Cloud Platform, consisting of the core in-memory database plus application development tools, analytics and integration services, will eventually underpin all of its cloud-based applications, the company said at its Sapphire conference.

• Big Data is a big but young market

  By Brandon Butler | 13 May, 2013 20:56

  A recent survey by Forrester found that 7 per cent of IT executives and 9 per cent of business leaders feel they have gained a true return on investment from Big Data. That means there's a lot more business can be doing to glean insights from the massive amount of data that's potentially available to them.