Enterprise Technology News

NEW YORK - IBM Corp. sold $3.9 billion in bonds on Thursday, a sign that the stalwarts of the corporate world are still finding lenders.

Super Micro Computer strives to be all things to all server customers -- a market approach that lets it compete against much larger rivals such as Hewlett-Packard , IBM and Dell (NasdaqGS:DELL - News).

SAN FRANCISCO - Even after IBM Corp. surprised Wall Street with a healthy profit in the third quarter and a reaffirmation of its earnings outlook for the rest of the year, the broader technology sector dived again Thursday. There's just not enough of what lifted IBM to go around.

At a time when consumers are worried about the nation's economy, IBM wants everyone to know it is financially sound. The Armonk, NY-based company released a preview of its earnings Wednesday, a week before its scheduled earnings announcement on Oct. 16, and said it remains confident in its financial outlook for the year.

SAN FRANCISCO - Shares of IBM Corp. jumped Thursday after the technology company's surprise announcement that it was still plenty prosperous in the third quarter despite the worsening economic climate.

NEW YORK - Stocks plunged Thursday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down 679 points — more than 7 percent — to its lowest level in five years. Stocks took a nosedive after a major credit-rating agency said it might cut its rating on General Motors and Ford, further rattling investors already fretting over the impact of tight credit on the economy.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM posted a higher-than-expected preliminary quarterly profit and affirmed its full-year outlook, calming some fears that the financial crisis is sparking a meltdown in technology demand.

San Francisco - As we've seen time and again, in an increasing number of enterprise software categories, open source has become a promising alternative to commercial software. But there's no free ride.

NEW YORK (AFP) - US computer giant IBM on Wednesday released preliminary earnings for the third quarter, reporting net profit of 2.8 billion dollars and earnings per share slightly better than most analysts' expectations.

As IBM sets out to launch its Bluehouse corporate social network to compete with Cisco and Google, word comes that Facebook and MySpace are the most popular social-networking sites for mobile-phone users.

San Francisco - Red Hat is expanding its open-source JBoss SOA platform with the unveiling Wednesday of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 and JBoss Operations Network 2.1.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - MySpace and Hewlett Packard on Tuesday announced an alliance aimed at getting people to print out more of the billions of pictures digitally stored at the world's leading social networking website.

NEW YORK - Among all the profiles on MySpace, the social networking site's users have uploaded almost 4 billion photos. Now through an agreement with Hewlett-Packard Co., MySpace hopes people will increasingly print these images and, eventually, buy photo-embellished merchandise, too.

Advanced Micro Devices, which has been struggling to regain its footing in competition with rival Intel, announced Tuesday that it will split into two companies. One of the companies will be a global enterprise focused on semiconductor manufacturing, temporarily called The Foundry Company. AMD itself will focus on designing microprocessors.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - The college roommate who helped Mark Zuckerberg start Facebook is leaving the fast-growing social networking website in a matter of weeks to create a new Internet technology firm.

San Francisco - Mixing together a m??lange of services, software, and marketing, IBM's announcement this week of its Cloud Services Initiative is about putting an organizing construct around all of its cloud offerings, according to one IBM executive.

IBM is getting in the cloud. After a string of announcements over the past few weeks from Citrix, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, Big Blue is launching an initiative to extend its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud-computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and independent software vendors (ISVs).

The Facebook duo is no more. One of Facebook's two cofounders is leaving the popular social-networking site.

Skype's president has acknowledged that users in China have had instant messages both blocked and copied to servers owned by TOM Online, Skype's partner in the country.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Online social networking site Facebook will set up its international operations center in Dublin, officials said on Thursday.

San Francisco - A small business is not necessarily a simple business. That rather basic lesson has taken much of the computer industry far too many years to learn. Successful SaaS vendors have realized that small businesses need the same sort of functions and support that large enterprises get ??? just in smaller quantities. Clearly Microsoft has come to the same realization with the release of Small Business Server 2008.

IBM has launched an iPhone-specific version of the company's popular Lotus Notes collaboration software. Called Lotus iNotes ultralite, the free download gives mobile business users the ability to securely connect to Lotus Notes and Domino e-mail accounts.

San Francisco - Ross Mayfield??, founder of Socialtext, unveiled this week version 3.0 of his company's enterprise wiki, which promises to make the corporate directory a social networking tool for the workplace.

BOSTON (Reuters) - IBM shares tumbled 6 percent on Wednesday, their biggest drop in three years, on concern the world's biggest computer services company's results missed Wall Street targets in the quarter that ended Sept 30.

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - Promises of the paperless office have been circulating ever since the first IBM clones started showing up on desks in the early 1980s. Yet we're still tied to printed documents and there's no sign that's going to change.

San Francisco - Microsoft on Wednesday is revealing an updated platform strategy to support composite applications in Windows Server and the .Net Framework programming model.

San Francisco - SpringSource, maker of the popular Spring Framework for Java application development, this week began offering its SpringSource dm Server, an OSGi-based application server to run enterprise Java and Spring applications.

(Reuters) - Social network software maker, Slide Inc has signed a deal with major media companies to distribute video content on Facebook, capitalizing on the success of social networking.

Hosted storage, like many other enterprise technologies and Web services from large data centers, is trickling down to small businesses. Western Digital has capitalized on the trend by offering ShareSpace, a four-terabyte storage system for small businesses.