The end-of-year holidays might be a time of peace on Earth, but CIOs are unlikely to be so relaxed this festive season, with many saying they'll still be on call over the holidays. Christmas may be a time of peace on earth but CIOs are unlikely to be so...

Virtualization became a buzz word last year - and since then some things have grown beyond our wildest dreams while others have fallen short. Here's what to expect in 2009. Commentary--At VMWorld 2007, it felt like the dawn of a new era. Virtualization was taking...

Industry observers say virtualization will enable staff to use their own devices at work, while keeping corporate data safe. Virtualization promises to usher in a new era of consumer technology in the workplace — potentially satisfying the demands of new workers from the Facebook generation who want to use...

Could you run your nightly batch cycle on your employees' PCs? Maybe save a bundle on hardware? Probably not. The technique is best for compute-intensive tasks--tasks that require lots of calculation and little data. by Ed Gottsman

A reseller for smart grid technology player Echelon announced a deal this week to deploy an advanced metering infrastructure system that will serve roughly 10,000 customers in Hassfurt, Germany. The contract, which will be rolled out over the next three years, is being handled by EVB Energie AG. The utility...

Appistry's Sam Charrington (Vice President of Product Management & Marketing) and I enjoyed a long chat about the companies newest marketing move, giving software away to develop a broad developer community. Since I have seen this done before, I wanted to know more about what the company was doing besides...

Another day another ActiveX problem. This time an ActiveX vulnerability in CA BrightStor ARCServe Backup could be exploited to compromise a user's system. A Secunia alert rates the vulnerability "highly critical." Here are the details: Krystian Kloskowski has reported a vulnerability in CA BrightStor ARCserve Backup,...

BMC said Monday that it will buy BladeLogic, which specializes in automating data centers, for $800 million, or $28 a share. The news comes on the heels of a bevy of data center announcements from HP, which is hoping enterprises go for its data center as a...

Once again, I had the opportunity to speak with the good folks of Digipede. As usual, I was impressed with their pragmatic approach and the fact that they're trying very hard to make grid computing/high performance computing concepts available to everyone by utilizing Microsoft's .NET architecture as a platform. This...

Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo looks pretty compelling on paper. The deal even makes for a nice PowerPoint slide on synergies, but putting these two behemoths together could be difficult. Why? There's a lot of overlap. First let's get the slides out of the way. On Microsoft's...

Although I've tracked Platform Computing for well over a decade, I don't get the chance to speak with them all that much. A short while ago, I had the opportunity to chat with Peter Dye, Product Manager of VM Orcestrator VMO. Although our discussion ranged from Platform's history, where it...

BMC announced today the acquisition of Emprisa Networks, which provides automated network configuration, compliance and change management software. BMC had been partnering with Emprisa, and the Emprisa E-NetAware is part of BMC's new Service Automation solution, which deals with coordinating and running provisioning and updates; server and network configuration;...

A few points to ponder ahead of the weekend...Why is my information always in the other database?When folks call customer service, some see incompetence. Others see red. I see data silos.This week I've called Verizon and Comcast about billing errors and been transferred repeatedly and also realized Yahoo thinks I...

Like many departments within many companies, today was a day when our department go together and did some online slide slidesharing. We use Microsoft's NetMeeting but I don't use Internet Explorer and my one attempt at at getting the slides on my screen (there's a way to view...

In response to yesterday's Tech Shakedown of McAfee's personal firewall product for issuing a useless dialog -- one that asks me to allow or block some behavior but that doesn't give me any idea, clues, or hints as to which of those two options to pick -- one ZDNet reader...

Perhaps no area of medicine will change as much in the next five years as payment processing, according to a new McKinsey report. (Illustration from the cover of the report.)Right now a key difference between a practice's success or failure is having an assistant who can work the system and get...

As far as security solutions go, personal firewalls are probably the most problematic category for vendors to get right, let alone users to get working. Not only are there differing philosophies about what belongs in a personal firewall and what doesn't (eg: whereas many personal firewalls can and will...

First, the good news.  Our Technology Shakedown videos seem to be striking a nerve so expect more of them. The idea? We shouldn't have to accept mediocrity in our technology products. Period.Now, the bad news. Judging by the responses to these shakedowns (yesterday's in particular), there's a contingent of end-users...

Since Mark Hurd took over the reigns of HP on March 29, 2005, the company has been leaning into software, mostly through acquisition. With the last 24 months, HP's software group has made six acquisitions, totally nearly $7 billion. It's not acquisition at Oracle scale, but it's a big shift...

365 Main on Wednesday detailed what went wrong during the San Francisco power outage last week and detailed what it's doing to make sure its facilities stay running in the future.The power outage on July 24 knocked various sites--including CNET, Craiglist and others--offline and raised questions about business continuity planning.Here's...