Enterprise

Ruckus intros affordable enterprise access points

For the majority of homes and apartments, a home router such as the D-Link DIR-855 or Linksys WRT320N would make a viable wireless network. However, if you want to share the Internet with a few neighbors or cover a warehouse with a wireless signal, you'd need an enterprise-class access point. The problem is this type of access point is generally expensive.

Ruckus Wireless wants to change this fact and announced Monday its new line of enterprise-class access points, the ZoneFlex 7300 series, which includes two products, the ZoneFlex 7343 and ZoneFlex 7363. The former is a single-band (2.4GHz) Wireless-N access point that offers speeds up to 300Mbps and costs $499. According to Ruckus, this is the only sub-$500 enterprise Wireless-N access point on the market.

The ZoneFlex 7363, on the other hand, has support for the dual-band standard (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and offers the maximum bandwidth of up to 600Mbps. For this reason it costs $100 more than the ZoneFlex 7343.

According to Ruckus, the ZoneFlex 7300 series models are the first access points in their class to integrate Ruckus patented smart antenna array and dynamic beam-forming technology, called BeamFlex, designed to deliver high throughput speeds at long range.… Read more

Dell earnings: Enterprise spending rebounds

Dell reported a better-than-expected fourth quarter as enterprise sales rebounded. The company said that it was "cautiously optimistic" that commercial IT spending will improve throughout the year ahead amid "ongoing signs of stabilization."

Dell reported fiscal fourth quarter net income of $334 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenue of $14.9 billion, up 11 percent from a year ago. That sales tally was $1 billion more than Wall Street expected. Non-GAAP earnings were $544 million, or 28 cents a share, a penny ahead of Wall Street estimates.

For fiscal 2010, Dell reported net income … Read more

RIM to give away server software

BARCELONA, Spain--BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is trying to hold on to business customers with a free version of its BlackBerry Enterprise Server software.

Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis announced here Tuesday during his keynote address to the Mobile World Congress that the company will offer a free version of BlackBerry Enterprise Server software for small and medium-size business customers, as well as for businesses that want to let employees use their own phones to access corporate e-mail.

BlackBerry Express Server is software that syncs BlackBerry phones with Microsoft Exchange or Windows Small Business servers. Previously, RIM had charged all companies a … Read more

PHP and Perl crashing the enterprise party

The enterprise has long favored Java and .Net, but PHP and other dynamic programming languages have left their infancies and are rapidly closing the gap on their more stodgy competitors.

That's the message I got from Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, the "dynamic languages company," in a conversation this past week. I wanted to find out how the Vancouver-based "old school" open-source company is faring in building business solutions and developer tools around Perl, Python and Tcl.

Quite well, as it turns out (and as described by Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond). But the story is … Read more

Microsoft dropping FAST search for Linux, Unix

Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release.

According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, the team will be "investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future."

Enterprise search remains a lucrative, if oddly fractured market. According to analyst firm Gartner, in 2008, software revenue (new licenses and maintenance revenue) in the enterprise … Read more

Can Microsoft be lust-worthy?

Microsoft is far from dead, but it's hemorrhaging on all sides, and particularly in markets closest to consumers like mobile where it is steadily losing market share.

As one example, though a potent one for me, a longtime friend and Microsoft employee wrote on Facebook that he had finally capitulated and bought an iPhone.

This is a man who dutifully stuck to Windows Mobile while the rest of the world fled. He's a man who resolutely continues to promote Microsoft for many good reasons..

He's now gone to the "dark side." Or the cool side, … Read more

Should enterprise IT piggyback on consumer Web?

For all the billions enterprises spend on IT each year, they arguably get far inferior software than Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other consumer Web companies make available for free. In part, the consumer Web can deliver exceptional value for so little because it piggybacks on the expensive infrastructure built by others.

Is it time for enterprise software to "pull a Google" and build solutions on the consumer Web?

It may sound preposterous, but consider just how good the software you use at work is compared to the software you use at home. It's not even close. The … Read more

An application war is brewing in the cloud

Today's cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won't be the case for long. It can't be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they're going to move "up the stack" into applications.

It's like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.

Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.… Read more

2010 the year of cloud-computing...M&A

Cloud computing is still more attractive to venture capitalists than it is to enterprise IT buyers, and that's unlikely to change in 2010. As IT buyers warm to the idea and implementation of cloud computing, 2010 is going to prove to be a very big year for cloud-computing M&A as big-fish vendors like VMWare, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle round out their cloud product portfolios with little-fish innovators.

Some, like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, suggest that cloud computing is simply a fad, one that attempts to solve many of the same problems that SOA, EDI, etc. already attempted … Read more