Stories about: Evolve

Citing the weak economy, SAP has cut the cost of developer subscriptions for its NetWeaver platform by roughly 50 percent, according to a post this week on an official company blog.

The future of corporate IT is in private clouds, flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon yet built and managed internally for each business's users, the analyst firm Gartner says.

SAP released the fourth enhancement package for its ERP 6.0 (enterprise resource planning) application on Wednesday, furthering a recent shift in product strategy that forgoes periodic full upgrades and adds new functionality on an incremental basis.

Australia could be the cloud computing hub of the Asia Pacific within the next 20 years, according to top government CIOs and industry experts.

Microsoft this week launched its cloud computing environment, Windows Azure, which is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform for developing applications extending from the cloud to PCs, datacenters, phones, and the Web. Microsoft's goal is to let Windows developers transition from Windows client development to Windows cloud development, using familiar tools, both those from Microsoft and other sources such as Eclipse. Developers would continue to develop apps on their desktops, but the Azure platform would handle the app deployment in the cloud.

Microsoft is putting the Windows client OS on a diet as a way to bring the PC OS into the age of cloud computing.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has officially filled the shoes previously worn by founder and Chairman Bill Gates, stepping in as leader of the company's vast developer network, which is its lifeblood and crucial to the enormous success of Windows. Ozzie delivered Monday's keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, introducing Windows Azure, a cloud-computing development and hosting environment that integrates Ozzie's vision for the future of the Web, which he began building at his company Groove Networks before he joined Microsoft.

SAP's venture capital arm has sunk an undisclosed sum of money into LinkedIn, the business-oriented social-networking site.

Apple has no imminent plans to compete in the growing market for "netbooks," the small, inexpensive laptops that accounted for 5 percent of all US notebook sales last quarter, CEO Steve Jobs said Tuesday.

McAfee is hunkering down to integrate the security technologies it has bought over the past several months into its varied line of security software and appliances. Two trends in the company's activities are developing parallel products for deployment as software on endpoints and as network-based appliances. This week, for instance, the company is announcing that NAC software can be installed on its IntruShield IPS appliance to give customers the option of enforcing NAC policies in the network, not just on the endpoint. The company is bringing management of these platforms under control of its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) in an effort to centralize control of network security. Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene spoke with McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt about these efforts as well as other issues facing the company.

As server virtualization projects gain scale and strategic value, enterprise IT managers must move quickly beyond tactical approaches to achieve best results.