News Archive - March 2010

The US General Services Administration (GSA) has acknowledged that the agency has not, in fact, saved $850 million through cloud computing services, as the senior GSA official in charge of cloud computing told an audience at FOSE. The savings are actually about $1.7 million per year.

Permalink

Both US and EU regulators give Cisco the green light to proceed with the acquisition of TANDBERG.

Permalink

Supermarket giant Tesco, despite expanding enthusiastically into all things mobile, has announced that it is putting an end to its VoIP service, with the operation scheduled to cease on April 27th.

Permalink

U.S. private-equity firm The Gores Group is mulling a merger between its unit Siemens Enterprise Communications and videoconferencing company Polycom.

Permalink

Dell sharpened its enterprise cloud computing strategy, launching a host of new products and services — including new cloud-specific servers — to deliver turnkey cloud solutions and start "taking the guesswork out" of cloud computing.

Permalink

AT&T sees its emerging devices business, which connects everything from E-readers to digital picture frames to dog collars to its wireless network, becoming a $1 billion business in roughly five years.

Permalink

Polycom and private equity firm Apax Partners no longer are in discussions whereby the video conferencing and telepresence company would sell itself to Apax.

Permalink

Polycom announced that it is beefing up its partnership with HP, which plans to utilize Polycom solutions in its expanded unified communications and collaboration services portfolio.

Permalink

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is setting up two new focus groups - one to look at cloud computing and one at smart grids - to identify what future telecommunications standards might be needed to support these technologies.

Permalink

Marten Mickos, the former chief executive of MySQL, will soon be named the chief executive of Eucalyptus, another open-source software maker that delivers private cloud software.

Permalink

Verizon Global Wholesale Division announced plans for three new VoIP and Internet packages designed for retail service providers to offer to small and midsize businesses. The wholesale offers will be accompanied by marketing efforts to SMBs.

Permalink

Mirial released ClearSea, a new comprehensive desktop videoconferencing solution engineered to meet the enterprise, healthcare and educational markets needs in the desktop videoconferencing space. Based on a client/server architecture, and built on over 10 years of Mirial desktop video excellence, ClearSea provides state-of-the-art PC and Mac Full-HD desktop client and the ability to seamlessly connect any legacy device.

Permalink

Savings arise from deferred costs for equipment upgrades and maintenance, power, and decreased labor costs. Most data centers provision for peak activity but operate at low utilization rates, thereby wasting valuable resources.

Permalink

Apax Partners has been in talks with Polycom, the largest maker of video conferencing equipment, about a deal to take the company private, which could value the group at more than $3 billion.

Permalink

Through 2012, 60% of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace, according to Gartner. Although Gartner expects this figure to fall to 30% by the end of 2015, analysts warned that many virtualization deployment projects are being undertaken without involving the information security team in the initial architecture and planning stages.

Permalink

Stormy weather could be on the horizon for cloud computing as security experts warn not enough is being done to make sure one of the hottest IT trends is safe.

Permalink

Hoping to further secure its position as leader in cloud-computing, Google announced the acquisition of DocVerse — a startup that helps users collaborate on Microsoft Office documents online.

Permalink

Many of the largest software and tech companies, such as Google and IBM, have publicly stated, on numerous occasions, just how vital of a role they see the future of cloud computing. Microsoft certainly sees a future in the clouds as well.

Permalink

For videoconferencing and telepresence to gain the same adoption as telephony, companies must improve the ease of use in scheduling and initiating new meetings. It must be as easy to start video collaboration technologies as it is to dial a phone number or begin an instant messaging conversation.

Permalink

Microsoft confirmed that its new phone operating system is as different under the hood as it is to the eye. Those developing software for Windows Phone 7 Series devices will do so using either Silverlight or XNA, the toolset used to create Xbox games.

Permalink

China Unicom, China's second largest mobile phone company, will be selling Google Android phones according to a report from Reuters.

Permalink

There is still a misconception that Amazon Web Services exists to sell the company's excess server capacity, but that is not the case, CTO Werner Vogels said.

Permalink

The common use of videophones could happen through three technologies that separately aren't exactly considered bleeding edge today: high-speed Internet, a television, and Skype.

Permalink

Apple is suing phone maker HTC, alleging that the Taiwanese company is infringing 20 Apple patents related to the user interface, underlying architecture, and hardware of the iPhone.

Permalink

The intellectual property landmine that is H.264 has given some reason to pause. MPEGLA licenses the 1000 or so patents related to H.264 on behalf of 26 companies. Just how many patents are not licensed by MPEGLA?

Permalink