The Little Hacker's Room

IT departments can reap the benefits of a lower total cost of ownership for their mobile workforce by replacing their field and remote staff's laptops with mobile smart phones. Knowledge Center contributor William Anderson explains the benefits of moving field and remote staff over to smart phones, and offers nine best practices for IT professionals to follow when doing so.
- Most businesses today have field and remote staff who use laptops, cell phones and other mobile devices. The number of employees doing so is escalating dramatically. Enterprises will see a major increase in usage by years end, while small and midsize businesses will see a significant increase as wel...

RIMs BlackBerry Storm smartphone offers all the enterprise features that businesses have come to know and love and that Apples iPhone lacks. However, the Blackberry Storm is slow, and its keyboard is clunky, particularly compared with the iPhone.
- The BlackBerry Storm 9530 is Research In Motion's first smartphone to dispense with a physical keyboard in favor of touch-sensitive display. As with other keyboardless devices, such as Apple's popular iPhone 3G, the absence of a physical keyboard in the Storm means more in the way of display spac...

With data volumes growing at 60 percent to 70 percent per year (Gartner's educated guess), and power costs expected to increase by 15 percent (the power industry's educated guess), how does an IT manager make peace with the very real possibility that he or she won't be able to buy as much power and capacity this next fiscal year?
- Where to Start Cutting Data Center Power Costs Here's a listing of ideas from Emerson Network Power that can be instituted immediately in virtually any data center. Cover Your Bases. It may be more difficult to recover from an outage during tough economic times than during prosperous one. A re...

Current macroeconomic conditions will impact data center budgets -- along with everything else -- big time in 2009. It follows that data center and IT managers will need to get more from their facilities with less money available. Here's a primer on where to find the low-hanging fruit of power savings.
- Data center budgets, along with just about every other budget in the business world, are being evaluated for 2009 and undergoing more scrutiny than usual due to uncertain macroeconomic conditions. So, with data volumes growing at 60 percent to 70 percent per year (Gartner's educated guess), and ...

Salesforce.com reports quarterly profit ahead of Wall Street expectations, though the enterprise applications maker issued forecasts that were below most Wall Street projections. Shares in CRM, SAAS and cloud computing specialist Salesforce.com rise after the results.
- * Q3 EPS 18 cents, tops Street view 17 cents * Q4 rev forecast $284-$285 mln, below Street view $289 mln * Q4 EPS forecast of 6-7 cents vs Street view of 7 cents (Adds analyst comment, byline) BOSTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) Salesforce.com Inc reported quarterly profit ahead of Wall Street expectatio...

Dell, the worlds second largest desktop and notebook vendor, beat Wall Street estimates after it posted a third-quarter net income of $727 million. While Dell has acknowledged that IT spending is down and its revenues dipped year-over-year, the companys efforts at cutting costs and reducing expenses helped the PC vendor turn a profit. While Dell executives did speculate about the fourth quarter or 2009, they did say that future is proving a challenge. For enterprises, CEO Michael Dell said the company plans to expand the companys server, data storage, and virtualization offerings.
- Dell, which remains the worlds second larger PC vendor, beat Wall Street estimates and posted a third-quarter net income of $727 million thanks to a number of aggressive cost cutting measures and a reduction in operating expenses. Dell released its third-quarter financial results Nov. 20. The c...

Research In Motion, the mobile and wireless device vendor known best for its often-imitated Chiclet-style thumb keyboards, has produced its first touch-screen device, the BlackBerry Storm. The BlackBerry Storm's most striking feature is its nifty SurePress touch-screen, which combines the flexibility of software-based input with the tactile response of physical buttons. Click on for some pictures of the Storm smartphone that we've taken during our tests so far, and then read our review of the device.
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A reported ban by the U.S. Army on USB devices underscores the growing prevalence of USB-based malware. Researchers at Symantec say they have observed an increase in USB security threats going back at least a year.
- Researchers at Symantec are noting an uptick in USB-based malware as reports surface of a U.S. Army ban on USB devices and portable media. According to reports on Wired, the U.S. Army has banned the use of USB sticks, flash media cards, CDs and other removable storage due to security concern...

Nortel's IP trunking technology is a way for SMBs to combine voice and data connections through PBX exchanges, which Nortel says will improve efficiency, cut costs and provide professional polish for midmarket companies.
- Rob Scheible, Nortel's senior marketing manager for Carrier VOIP and Applications Marketing, says he gets one constant appeal from small and midsize businesses looking to increase their competitiveness, and it isn't about saving money. quot;When we talk to SMBs, they all say, 'We may be a small...

Datawatch is expanding its business intelligence software into the midmarket, with a focus on helping SMBs cut costs by improving data access and analysis efficiency with web-based services.
- Datawatch Corporation, a Chelmsford, Mass-based Enterprise Information Management (EMI) company, announced today its Q4 and fiscal 2008 earnings and signaled a commitment to expanding its technology offerings to SMBs. Despite a dip in quarterly and fiscal year earnings, CEO Ken Bero said expansion i...

A survey by Appistry and CloudCamp shows that respondents chose Amazon.com and its Amazon Web Services over Google by a margin of nearly two to one as the company expected to have the largest impact on cloud computing. Security, reliability and scalability emerged as the top three challenges to greater adoption of cloud computing.
- Amazon.com bested Google in a survey as the company cloud watchers expect to play the largest role in the future of cloud computing. Appistry and quot;unconference quot; organization CloudCamp have announced findings from the first of a series of surveys the two organizations are conducting a...

Given the current state of the economy and the yawning federal deficit, the efficiency and cost-savings associated with cloud computing are prompting U.S. federal IT agencies to flirt with the cloud platform. Slowly, of course, since it is the government, after all.
- Cloud computing has become so pervasive in the enterprise that even federal agencies are moving slowly, of course in the direction of on-demand computing. Given the current state of the economy and the yawning federal deficit, the efficiency and cost-savings associated with cloud computing may pr...

IBM researchers and scientists from several major universities, with the aid of a $4.9 million grant from DARPA, will look to use nanoscale technology to create new types of computers capable of cognitive thinking. The goal of the IBM research is to find whether new types of IT infrastructure and computers can not only collect data but use that data to solve problems and make decisions in the same way the human brain solves problems.
- While a computer with artificial intelligence such as HAL of quot;2001: A Space Odyssey quot; remains the stuff of science fiction, IBM researchers are looking to develop technologies that will bring cognitive abilities to a new class of computers. IBM researchers, along with scientists from se...

Disk-based archiving can be the most logical step for IT professionals looking to add capacity and increase storage efficiencies, while avoiding the additional cost of purchasing more primary storage. Disk-based archiving solves today's data retention and compliance needs, while laying the foundation for upcoming requirements for data retention. Knowledge Center contributor George Crump explains the benefits of using disk-based archiving in your enterprise.
- In these cost-conscious times, CIOs have increasingly been feeling the pressure to either cut their IT budget or to keep it flat. Overall, IT budgets are tightening across all industries lately. Some are flat as compared to last year and some are being reduced. If they are growing at all, it is only...

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, delivers an update on Internet Explorer 8, saying the product will ship in 2009. Microsoft had said the final version of the IE8 browser would ship by the end of 2008.
- Although Microsoft had been saying as late as the summer that it expected to release version 8 of Internet Explorer by the end of the year, it looks like we will have to wait until 2009 to see it. Indeed, according to published reports, Microsoft said IE8 would be available quot;later this year....

In this IT Link podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, the CEO of VSS Monitoring, Terrence Martin Breslin, explains why we need a more holistic approach to network management.
- Audio Podcast Content....

IBM plans to acquire virtualization company Transitive, but company representatives say it is too soon to discuss the impact IBM's expanded virtualization portfolio will have on SMBs.
- Big Blue announced plans to acquire the privately owned virtualization company Transitive Corporation, based in Los Gatos, Calif. The acquisition is part of IBMs strategy to expand its virtualization portfolio. Transitive technology is already incorporated into IBMs PowerVM software, which is design...

IBM ratchets up application development for mobile and wireless platforms by enabling Lotus Notes Traveler to run on Nokia's S60 smartphones. This is a major move for IBM to spark adoption of its messaging and collaboration software among the enterprise mobility classes, where Microsoft, RIM, Cisco and others are also looking to live.
- IBM Lotus Notes Traveler, a push e-mail technology that lets users access e-mail and other content from Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Domino Web Access users, has been extended to support Nokia's S60-based mobile smartphones. This means content enabled through Traveler, certified to work on Resea...

Today's uncertain economy is affecting everyone's jobs, businesses, and the world of tech in general. The uncertainty is creating psychological, mental, financial and social stress on everyone. Knowledge Center contributor David Gewirtz gives IT professionals some coping strategies to make it through this uncertain and stressful period.
- Some years back I wrote a pretty well-received book entitled “The Flexible Enterprise,” which was all about how businesses can manage and thrive in a changing economy. Over the past week, I've gotten a bunch of letters from readers asking about how all the economic fuss we've been experiencing will ...

Virtualization is heralded for reducing server sprawl and optimizing utilization. Yet deployed incorrectly, it can wreak havoc on an enterprise. With virtualization, enterprises have the power to move resources in an instant, but the wrong move can actually hinder user performance and increase management costs. Knowledge Center contributor Justin Steinman explains the steps necessary to successful virtualization in a mixed data center environment.
- As heterogeneous data centers become more complex, so does the scale of the virtualization project. Managing not only multiple platforms but countless hypervisors, operating systems and even virtualization tools causes exponential levels of complexity. In addition, virtual machines can rapidly proli...