Stories about: Big Blue

While most eyes are still on stopping the bleed on Wall Street, smart tech companies will likely take a page out of Warren Buffet's playbook by looking for merger and acquisition opportunities with stocks at multi-year lows.

Mixing together a melange 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 targeting retail security with a package of software and services designed to prevent physical loss of merchandise, protect against electronic threats and comply with credit card industry regulations.

To avoid getting lost in today's constantly evolving online marketplace, you should be looking to upgrade your e-commerce system within the next six to 12 months.

IBM is introducing a new services offering to help customers deploy mobile technologies, and releasing software that makes it easier to monitor business activities and access mainframe applications on a smartphone.

With more and more companies jumping into the cloud computing fray, this week's joint announcement by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo seems like a yawner. But it isn't.

The SOA concept -- developing a software architecture based on service components that can be mixed and matched as needed to reduce development time and increase application deployment flexibility -- is only a few years old, but the providers of SOA-supporting infrastructure are fast consolidating. Oracle captured the headlines with its acquisition of BEA Systems this spring, and Progress Software recently bought Iona Technologies.

Both IBM and Sun this week claim to have developed the "first one terabyte storage tape drive," but Sun will get its drive on the market a little bit sooner than IBM.

Reaping the fat savings of thin provisioning may have gotten a little easier, as IBM this week announced new features for managing SVC (SAN Volume Controller). And depending on your strategy for implementing SVC's new thin-provisioning capabilities in your storage environment, the news could come with a green lining.

IBM is shipping upgrades this month to its Web 2.0-based social networking tools for business, adding capabilities in enhanced profiling, data display and collaboration.

Imagine how different the computing world would be if IBM had used proprietary chips in the original PC, rather than off-the-shelf components. The PC clone market would never have happened, and IBM, rather than Microsoft, might have emerged as the leading company of the computer revolution.