Enterprise software

Give Hewlett-Packard's management credit for keeping the company's annual shareholders meeting as uneventful as possible. Considering the soap opera drama leading up to today's event, that was no mean feat.

Earlier in the day, Autonomy founder Mike Lynch published an open letter, suggesting questions that shareholders ought to ask of management in connection with the allegations that HP made against Autonomy after paying $11.1 billion to buy the software company. In November, HP shocked Wall Street when it took an $8.8 billion accounting charge related to the acquisition. At the time, the company said that … Read more

Oracle's third quarter earnings had a big buildup but fell short of analysts' expectations amid currency fluctuations and a sales shortfall in most units.

The company reported third quarter earnings of $2.5 billion, or 52 cents a share, on revenue of $8.96 billion, down 1 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings were 65 cents a share.

Wall Street was looking for earnings of 66 cents a share on revenue of $9.38 billion.

In a statement, Oracle largely blamed currency fluctuations. A stronger U.S. dollar hurt reported revenue. However, even with constant currency Oracle's … Read more

BlackBerry co-founder and former CEO Mike Lazaridis has veered from mobile devices and set his sights on quantum technology.

This technology is so fascinating to him that he and fellow BlackBerry co-founder Doug Fregin have launched a $100 million investment fund, called Quantum Valley Investments, to work on commercial applications for breakthroughs in quantum science, according to the Wall Street Journal.

But, what exactly are breakthroughs in quantum science?

According to Lazaridis, one need look no further than Star Trek.

"There's this buzz around the world that this quantum information science is starting to bear fruit," Lazaridis … Read more

On March 19, day one of Microsoft's annual Convergence conference, company officials shed more light on how Yammer's enterprise social-networking technology will be integrated into Office 365 and SharePoint in the coming year-plus.

Microsoft officials originally shared a road map regarding this integration in November. But today, officials provided more dates and more details around the integration of Yammer feeds into SharePoint.

Last fall, Microsoft officials said in the "immediate future" Yammer and SharePoint would be unified via a single ID/sign-on, shared document-management capabilities and feed aggregation. In the longer term, the Softies said, the … Read more

Belkin announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Linksys from Cisco.

The privately held networking vendor unveiled its interest in Linsys in late January, and now the deal is complete. This means Linksys' technologies, including its routers and the Smart Wi-Fi portfolio and services, will be managed and maintained by Belkin, but as a separate brand and product portfolio.

This also means that Cisco Connect Cloud, with which users can manage and control control home networks powered by a Smart Wi-Fi router via the Internet, will also be branded without Cisco in its name.

Cisco bought Linksys back … Read more

There's been some worry that Microsoft's Windows team may be waiting until the "Blue" upgrade to Windows 8 and Windows RT to refresh the Microsoft-developed, first-party apps that are bundled with the operating system.

I'm hearing from my contacts that this is not the case. In fact, updates to the Windows Mail, Calendar, Music, and Games apps for Windows 8 and Windows RT may be available to users as soon as this month.

Microsoft officials aren't commenting on this bit of information that I received from one of my contacts who has been dead-on … Read more

Buried in a press release on Yammer momentum are a couple of new details about Microsoft's plans for integrating Yammer with SkyDrive Pro and Office Web Apps by summer 2013.

From the February 20 press release:

"SkyDrive Pro was previewed at the recent SharePoint Conference, and Yammer is implementing it as the underlying platform for file storage. In addition, Yammer is enhancing the ability to preview and edit files directly within Yammer feeds using Office Web Apps. The combination of these capabilities will dramatically enhance a user's ability to create, collaborate, share, and discover content within Yammer. … Read more

It is nearly impossible to hear the acronym "IE" in a workplace setting without somebody appending to it the word "sucks." To be more genteel about it, older versions of Internet Explorer on corporate computers simply do not reflect the quality of modern browsers. So why does that massive corporation you work for make you use IE 8 or older in the first place?

A complicated problem Why you're forced to do at least some work in slow, standards noncompliant, security risk-prone legacy versions of Internet Explorer comes down to your employer's need to … Read more

Microsoft's Surface Pro is apparently just what businesses want in what was formerly known as the desktop computer. If that's the case, Apple's brain trust may want to revisit the space where the Mac and the iPad intersect.

According to Forrester Research's annual survey of nearly 10,000 people around the world who use a computer to do their jobs an hour or more a day, 32 percent said they would prefer Windows over Apple or Android for their next work tablet. Currently, about 2 percent are using a Windows tablet for their work.

Forrester predicts … Read more