This recession is a long way from over if Verizon’s latest earnings are anything to judge by. Reporting second-quarter earnings that were a penny better than the 62 cents per share Wall Street had been expecting, the company said it suffered a nasty 21 percent drop in profit thanks to the econalypse, which is pinching enterprise customers pretty hard these days.
The first half of 2009 has been brutal time for the IT sector. With consumers hesitant to buy and enterprise slashing IT budgets, world-wide information technology spending this year will decline six percent. That’s the word from Gartner, which back in March was claiming the decline would be just 3.8 percent.
Gmail is finally out of beta. Five years after it was launched, Google’s email service has gone gold and shed the beta label, having met whatever mysterious criteria the company uses to assess final-release software.
Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi has a few ideas about what Dell should do with the nearly $11 billion in cash reserves it’s sitting on and they don’t include buying Palm. Sacconaghi believes that Dell isn’t interested in a “transformational” acquisition, though its interest in the handset market might suggest otherwise. Rather, the company is mulling the acquisition of small- to medium-sized enterprise-related companies.
Between 2006 and 2011, IBM expects the number of mobile phone users to increase by 191 percent to approximately one billion. Little wonder then that the company is dedicating more resources to mobile services-related R&D.
A week after launching Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook with great swagger and pomp, Google is taking heat for unwittingly disabling one of the mail client’s key functions. Seems the service, which allows enterprise to use Outlook without shouldering the costs of running an Exchange server, doesn’t play well with Windows Desktop Search.
Q: How much revenue flows through this (Apps)? A: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’re going to get.
Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft and its entrenchment in this particular sector? A: Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem.
That’s a start, I suppose.
What’s Google got that is new today? Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, for one thing. The App allows users to sync Outlook with Apps, just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange. Offers fast email sync with Google-native protocol, full calendar and contact sync, as well as global address autocomplete and search and free/busy information support.
Pretty slick. Google has essentially recreated the Outlook GUI within Apps.
The title of this morning’s presentation is “Google Apps: The Enterprise Cloud.” Presiding over it, Andrew Kovaks from Google’s cloud computing team and Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division. According to the schedule provided, it will feature a CIO roundtable discussion as well as some new product demos.
In a year, Google Apps will be “night and day from what they are today.” That’s what Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division, told attendees of the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch Technology Conference last week. Today we’ll likely find out whether that was truly a foretelling of things to come or more Google braggadocio. At an event in San Francisco, Google was set to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft Office. Click through for a live blog of the event.
With smartphones as apt to be running personal productivity apps as business productivity ones, the divide between enterprise devices and their consumer counterparts appears to have finally been bridged. To wit, these comments from Cisco CEO John Chambers, who says the days of the so-called corporate device are ending.
Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” is looking more and more like Bloom County’s Bill the Cat these days and Dell’s decision to shutter its plant in the Irish city of Limerick certainly won’t improve matters. According to report by Forfas, the country’s policy advisory body for enterprise and science, the closure will cost the region almost 9,500 jobs–nearly four times the 2,510 that will be lost by the closure itself.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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