With the last-minute Valentine's Day shoppers increasingly turning to the Internet to make up for lost time, e-commerce companies are doing everything they can to stand out from the pack. However, some sites inevitably fall victim to the problems that result from this rise in demand.

The growing importance of reliable applications in the enterprise has opened a lucrative market opportunity for application performance management vendors, some of which have taken full advantage lately.

Dell's formation of a new software group, which was announced Thursday, could be the forerunner to a string of acquisitions by the vendor, with some observers predicting a focus on systems management and cloud services provisioning.

Microsoft next year will change its automated update process for the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser to push out the latest version of the browser for XP, Vista and Windows 7 without the notification-style install prompt presented to the end user today.

Hailed as one of Microsoft's broadest, deepest releases, Windows Server 8 will replace the current version of the OS, Windows Server 2008, in 2012 about the same time the new companion desktop OS, Windows 8, is released. Microsoft has a broad set of goals to reach with this release, such as cloud compatibility and automation of routine tasks across multiple machines. The new release also benefits from Microsoft's work building out its own Azure cloud service. Many technologies developed for the server were tested in the cloud, and many technologies developed for Azure were then imported back to the server.

With some funding from Google and the U.S. Energy Department, a pair of computer scientists at Dartmouth University are updating the venerable grep and diff Unix command line utilities to handle more complex types of data.

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) management tool will from now on tell users about upcoming scheduled operational activities that will affect the availability of its cloud, the company said in blog post on Thursday.