SYS-CON Events announced today that Microsoft was named "Platinum Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, which will take place on March 30-April 1, 2009, in New York City. The event is expected to attract over 1,200 developers, engineers, architects,...

The folks at the Wall Street Journal who brought us tales of IBM buying Sun for $6.5 billion-$8 billion last week were saying by Friday that due diligence was holding up any announcement. The paper seemed to think that IBM lawyers were paying particular attention to Sun's many differen...

Double-Take Software announced the availability of the latest version of its flagship Double-Take for Windows product and enhancements to other products in the company’s suite including complete platform support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008. Doubl...

Microsoft has pushed out Internet Explorer 8. PC arbiter Walt Mossberg, who calls the browser arguably the most important piece of software on a computer, says it’s a big improvement over IE7 and a “much closer competitor to its main rival, Mozilla’s Firefox.” It’s more stable, more co...

"We are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match," declared Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, today as Microsoft announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8. "Customers have made clear...

AccuRev has increased the financial institution’s ability to deliver more working software to its operations staff at a fraction of the time it previously took using a less agile SCM tool. Previously, developers may have been impacted for a week at a time during a development stabiliza...

CEO Joe Tucci said for what must be the umpteenth time Tuesday that EMC has no intention of parting with its roughly 84% majority stake in virtualization leader VMware. The occasion was EMC’s first analyst day in a dog’s age. EMC has been under pretty constant market pressure since VMw...

Microsoft was supposed to submit its rebuttal the other day to the European Commission’s January antitrust finding that bundling the Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system is anti-competitive. Instead it asked for and got a deadline extension until April 21. Micros...

Microsoft and the Creative Commons turned up at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and released an Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 so authors can add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. On...

Sybase Chairman and CEO John Chen who appeared on CNBC Closing Bell on Wednesday said Sybase is providing mobile solutions to SAP. "Sybase and SAP are both leaders in their respective spaces. We will bring what consumers are enjoying for years to the enterprise users. Immediate busines...

It's official. Microsoft is going to let PC users turn its browser off in Windows 7 to keep the European Commission at bay. The EC's latest indictment of Microsoft accuses it of the antitrust sin of tying Internet Explorer to the Windows operating system, a charge brought by Opera and ...

The European Commission said Wednesday that it no longer needs a full-time monitoring trustee to ensure Microsoft's compliance with its 2004 antitrust decree. Instead it intends to rely on the ad hoc assistance of technical consultants. The trustee was brought in in 2005 to access the ...

Jon Peddie, the graphics guru, says the popular integrated graphics processor chipset known as the IGP and used in PCs for the last 11 years is only going to be around for a few more years. By 2012 it will have ceased to exist, replaced by graphics embedded in the processor. Peddie cal...

In her first public appearance Tuesday since her apotheosis Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz laid down terms. If there are going to be talks with Microsoft, they're going to be private, not in the press, a perimeter she's apparently already communicated to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Infragistics has announced the immediate availability of NetAdvantage for Silverlight Data Visualization 2009 Volume 1. A complete collection of data visualization-focused user interface (UI) controls NetAdvantage for Silverlight Data Visualization 9.1 is geared towards developers who ...

Microsoft is pushing its SaaS Business Productivity Online Suite, part of Microsoft Online Services, out for trial to 19 countries. That will make Exchange Online and SharePoint Online available for trial in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, J...

Razorfish, one of the largest digital marketing companies in the world and an independent Microsoft subsidiary acquired when Redmond bought aQuantive, is going to use Rackspace Hosting’s Mosso cloud hosting platform. What it’s not doing, of course, is waiting around to use Windows Azur...

That Windows Vista Capable suit that’s been dogging Microsoft and making its internal e-mail entertaining common fodder has been stripped of its class action cachet. Decertification basically flings the suit into limbo even if Microsoft didn’t get the summary judgment it wanted. The si...

Red Hat and Microsoft, about as virulent a pair of enemies as has ever existed, threw a leash over their fire-breathing dragons long enough on Monday to announce a cooperative pact forced on them by their mutual users - folks who may be holding back from committing to virtualization ah...

Microsoft has bought a piece of Affle Holdings, a Singapore-based mobile marketing company. The investment was part of Affle’s B round and represents 20% of the company according to the Economic Times of India. Affle says it will leverage Microsoft’s expertise and relationships in the ...

Telefonica and Microsoft have announced that the companies are deploying a range of Windows Live for Mobile client application services for their mutual customers on their mobile devices. Telefonica will enable its customers to download a Java-based client application that gives them a...

Ahead of Microsoft launching Office 14 – which is supposed to offer live collaboration – and despite the free hit-or-miss Office Live Workspace, a funded year-old start-up called DocVerse founded by a couple of ex-Microsoft SharePoint and SQL people says it’s making Office 2007 documen...

Microsoft now has 10,000 patents to its name that it can try to monetize. The IEEE rates its patent portfolio as having the most power and influence industry-wide, a determination made in part by how often it is cited as prior art. The company has signed 500 licensing agreements.

Microsoft said that it’s going to open its own stores worldwide to “create a better PC and Microsoft retail purchase experience.” They will have to bear comparison to Apple and its 250 stores, which have been eating into Microsoft’s sales. The company has hired David Porter as corporat...

Ten months after plunking down a lavish $1.2 billion in cash for the publicly traded, financially compromised Norwegian ISV Fast Search and Transfer, Microsoft has produced a roadmap of where it’s going in enterprise search. The roadmap, sparse on detail, says it’s going to take Micros...

IDC says there was a "precipitous" drop in the number of PC processors shipped worldwide between the third quarter and the fourth quarter last year - the worst, in fact, since it started tracking such things in 1996 - and it holds out scant hope for this half, which is why even the mig...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, whose sales are suffering along with everybody else's, sent the following letter to every member of Congress Wednesday urging them to move on the $789 billion stimulus package. The text is posted on Microsoft's web site.

Mozilla – with its Firefox browser, a direct descendant of the Netscape browser that played such a pivotal part in the great antitrust suit that the Justice Department brought against Microsoft in 1998 – is throwing its support behind the European Commission’s replay of that suit, char...

EntropySoft has announced the release of a new Microsoft SharePoint connector. EntropySoft’s new version of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 connector enables read and write access to content stored in the Microsoft SharePoint repository. The Microsoft SharePoint connector is part of EntropyS...

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources and data to meet the changing needs of the business. Implementing SOA depends upon the IT organization being able to build interoperable, robust, reusable, and composable Services that abstract the underlying...

Connecting to a database requires a number of independent layers. The application needs to incorporate software that establishes the connection and calls to the database. A database connectivity layer needs to be in place to help manage security, communications, and data flow with the ...

This paper focuses on ADO.NET and how you can best implement it in your environment, what you must consider as you select your data connectivity middleware, and how your choices impact the development, deployment, and production-use of your application. Click here to read more about ho...

Sunbelt Software, a provider of Windows security software, today announced the release of a major upgrade to Sunbelt Network Security Inspector. The new version of this network vulnerability scanner delivers enhancements such as a new scanning engine for faster scan times, a more intui...

Microsoft – which has yet to get its tit out of the legal wringer it got caught it because of the famous “Vista Capable” promotion – has started trying to discriminate between Windows 7 SKUs now, a year ahead of the operating system’s ostensible due date.

The US Supreme Court was asked to review the infamous Bilski business methods patent decision handed down en banc in October by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit limiting patents to things that “transform an article to a different state or thing” or are “tied to a particular...

It's beginning to look as though we may get to hear this year if the federal appeals court buys the idea that Novell owns Unix. SCO's appeal of the Utah district court's 2007 summary judgment finding in Novell's favor has been put on an expedited schedule by the US Court of Appeals for...

According to what Microsoft is saying now, the so-called Windows 7 Server is not a major release and is really nothing more than Windows Server 2008 R2, a continuation of the Long Horn code base, with no changes to the core operating system components. And although the Microsoft Server...

What is Windows Embedded? Windows Embedded is a family of operating systems that offer familiar tools and technologies for developers to bring the next generation of smart, connected, service-oriented devices to market. Windows Embedded features enable interoperability with industry st...

Intel chairman and former CEO Craig Barrett, 69, is going to retire in May and hand the job to independent director Jane Shaw. Intel hasn’t had a non-executive chairman since Arthur Rock, the company’s original financier, the guy who gave venture capital its name. Shaw, a contemporary ...

The new release focuses on support for volume and/or profit growth strategies, pricing process agility (to cope with cost/price volatility), improved compliance monitoring, and capabilities for dealing with rapidly changing customer demand. The update also includes a major architectura...