If you've ever wanted to build a mobile app for your small business but have been intimidated by the cost of hiring developers, Appsbar has a proposition for you.

Increased adoption of cloud services, combined with the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phenomenon, is causing identities and access rights to proliferate throughout the enterprise, putting ever-greater stress on organizations to go beyond perimeter defenses to secure access to sensitive information.

Mobile open source software projects continue to double annually, with more enterprise applications added to the mix.

For the third year in a row, mobile open source software projects have more than doubled in number, with the current count at around 18,000, up from around 8,000 in 2010. The rise of mobile computing in the enterprise, coupled with the Android's rapid adoption worldwide, contributes to the trend as developers race to be the first to market with mobile innovations.

The technology may get a big push from mobile adoption, but integration among multiple UC components is still a tough slog and adoption rates are low

Unified communications (UC) technology has garnered a fair amount of attention, much of it due to vendors touting their UC offerings as the answer to problems workers have keeping in touch with colleagues, business partners and customers in a highly frenetic, increasingly mobile business world.

LifeSize has unveiled two portable, all-in-one videoconferencing units for various work spaces, including home offices, meeting rooms and executive offices.

The Unity 50 is a tabletop or wall-mounted unit with a 24-inch LED display with 720p HD resolution combined with camera, microphone, speakers and endpoint technology. The Unity 50 is priced at $3,999.

Aastra recently announced the release of the MX-ONE 5.0, a new multimedia collaboration solution for medium and large enterprises. The latest offering from Aastra has been designed to effectively convert highly scalable communication servers into a video and mobility optimized multimedia communication platform for medium and large enterprises.

Fresh on the heels of rolling out its virtual desktop-as-a-service Simplified DaaS, Dell is bolstering its cloud services offerings again with Integration Packs, “a point-to-point integration solution … that enables automatic synchronization of critical data between popular software applications.”

For $65 a month, customers will be able to sync financial tool QuickBooks with Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) services starting in June.

A new study from International Data Corporation explored trends and forecasts for voice connections via customer-premises equipment (CPE). According to the study, CPE-based voice connections will continue to be the most predominant business connection type in Western Europe, and by 2015, they will represent 73 percent of the total voice connections in Western Europe.