Jive Software has released an add-on to its ESN (enterprise social networking) software that automates and simplifies the process of integrating Jive's suite with third-party systems.

The add-on is based on technology Jive acquired when it bought a company called StreamOnce. At launch, the StreamOnce add-on links Jive's ESN suite with the Gmail and Microsoft Exchange email servers and with the DropBox cloud storage app.

Small and medium-sized business (SMB) spending on cloud solutions will grow almost 20 percent annually through 2018, IDC predicts. If your business doesn’t use hosted communications and IT services, here are five reasons why it should:

Sonus has enhanced its session border controller portfolio, targeting both enterprise and service provider market opportunities. Among the enhancements: modular form factor session border controllers (SBCs) designed to permit customers to field-install digital signal processor (DSP) cards at their own pace, nearly 100 new software enhancements, and an enhanced survivable branch appliance (SBA) functionality with mobile broadband 3G/4G failover capability meant to ensure Microsoft Lync Server operations during wide area network (WAN) failures.

Capitalising on apparent demand from customers, NetSuite is adding new capabilities aimed at manufacturers to its cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

NetSuite will announce a new version of its existing manufacturing ERP during the SuiteWorld conference in San Jose on Tuesday, CEO Zach Nelson said in an interview prior to the event. It's also going to announce a partnership with Autodesk that will see the latter's PLM (project lifecycle management) application integrated with NetSuite, Nelson said.

Est-ce vraiment une surprise ? En ces temps moroses, le marché français des tablettes conserve la forme. Selon le cabinet d’études GfK, il devrait s’écouler dans l’Hexagone en 2013 6 millions d’ardoises tactiles, soit une forte progression de 65% par rapport à l’année dernière (3,6 millions).

Pourquoi ce fort attrait cette année ? Les prix pratiqués semblent être le principal argument.

Numergy est l’un des deux projets de cloud « à la française » soutenu par l’État (via la Caisse des Dépôts), Bull et SFR. Lancé en à l’automne 2012, cette société construit et exploite des infrastructures cloud pour les entreprises et les organisations publiques.

Pour concrètement déployer ses offres cloud, Numergy a signé de nouveaux accords de partenariat avec 23 acteurs pour étoffer son réseau de distribution.

ShoreTel has announced a new product called the ShoreTel Dock -- a business-grade docking station that transforms iPhones and iPads into desk phones when paired with ShoreTel Mobility. The ShoreTel Dock turns Apple handhelds running the ShoreTel Mobility app into business desk phones and enterprise collaboration tools. ShoreTel is demonstrating the ShoreTel Dock and its portfolio of enterprise unified communications solutions at Interop 2013 in Las Vegas.

Box has acquired Crocodoc in a move to significantly improve the way documents are rendered for viewing on its enterprise storage and file sharing service. Box will integrate Crocodoc's HTML5 technology into its product and use it to eventually replace its existing document preview feature.

Crocodoc was founded in 2007, and its document rendering and viewing technology is used by services including Microsoft's Yammer, Facebook, LinkedIn and BlackBoard.

Cloud-based infrastructure and software providers like Amazon and Salesforce are incorporating application development tools into their offerings, blurring the lines between IaaS, SaaS and PaaS.

Nvidia is banking on new computing devices to replace "cheap" PCs and Android to drive that disruption, according to comments from the chipmaker's chief executive on Thursday.

"A great tablet is clearly better than a cheap PC," said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during the company's fiscal first quarter conference call.

Salesforce.com and European venture capital firms have announced a 5 million € Innovation Challenge, a competition for European start-ups building enterprise cloud apps on the Salesforce platform.

Eligible start-ups will be invited to present their ideas to professional investors at a series of Innovation Challenge pitch events throughout Europe, hosted by Salesforce.com from September to November 2013.

Citrix has added instant messaging to its Podio enterprise collaboration product so that employees can engage in one-to-one and group text chats while they work on tasks and projects.

This summer, Citrix will extend Podio Chat with audio communications and video conferencing, expanding the real-time communications features of the product.

"Now you can chat within Podio in the context of your work," said Bernardo de Albergaria, vice president and general manager of SaaS products and markets at Citrix.

Digium has announced the general availability of two new Switchvox appliances targeting the IP phone system needs of midsize businesses.

Mobile PC shipments are expected to hit 762 million by 2017, thanks to demand for tablets and touchscreen-enabled notebooks, according to NPD DisplaySearch. Tablets and touchscreens will provide a huge helping hand to the PC industry in the coming years, says NPD DisplaySearch.

While Amazon is still king in the cloud computing world, it appears that Microsoft's Azure software is on the up and up. Not only have Azure subscriptions risen 48 percent over the past six months, but Azure and related Microsoft cloud service software earned $1 billion in revenue over the past year for the first time ever, according to Bloomberg.

Making the "billion-dollar club" is pretty significant -- considering the slumping PC market. Microsoft revealed these new performance details to Bloomberg in an interview.

IBM today unveiled MessageSight, a 2U appliance that would serve as a cornerstone to Big Blue's "Internet of things" vision: The hardware is a big data orchestrator, and according to IBM, it's capable of handling up to 13 million incoming messages per second flowing in from up to 1 million different sensors installed in anything -- automobiles, medical equipment, home appliances, mobile devices -- such that the data can be transformed into useful information.

Global CRM (customer relationship management) revenue grew 12.5 percent in 2012 to $18 billion, a rate three times that of all enterprise software segments on average, as companies look to acquire more business and serve existing customers better, according to a new Gartner report.

Chat apps now more popular than SMS worldwide. A handful of popular chat applications have already found a way to outpace SMS, according to new data.

Research firm Informa announced today that six of the most popular mobile chat applications, including WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple's iMessage, and KakaoTalk, averaged nearly 19 billion messages sent and received worldwide each day in 2012. The company estimates that 17.6 billion SMS messages were sent each day, as well.

Orange Business Services has announced the global expansion of "Business Together as a Service" -- a move the company touts as the "market's first Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offer available for large enterprises on a global scale," according to the company's statement. The cloud service, originally deployed in France and Europe, is hosted in three regional data centers (Atlanta, Frankfurt and Singapore) that are part of the Orange Business Services dedicated cloud computing infrastructure.

Parallèlement à une exploitation grand public de son offre multiplay autour de la Bbox, Bouygues Telecom explore, via sa branche Entreprises, la dimension du standard téléphonique, avec une formule dédiée aux PME.
L’opérateur constate que 64% des entreprises de moins de 50 salariés se sont dotées d’un PBX.

CA Technologies' CTO John Michelsen has confirmed that the company will raise the costs of running legacy software in a bid to facilitate its current drive to get customers off of old releases and on to software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms.

The debate about the bring-your-own-device movement (BYOD) has quieted down, mostly because, it seems, while IT has been over in the corner arguing the pros and cons, employees have been streaming into office with their shiny new toys and using them to get work done.

Enterprises and individual developers alike are heavily leveraging API-based access to data and services, especially for mobile and cloud apps. And they're getting an increasing palette of technologies to choose from for managing all those API processes. "A lot of our customers are exposing their services through APIs," says Apigee spokesman Bala Kasiviswanathan.

Jive Software has upgraded its enterprise social collaboration product to make it easier to tailor group sites for specific business tasks and flag member comments to trigger specific actions.

Jive is also delivering deep integration between its software and the Box cloud storage and file sharing service, as well as tighter links with Salesforce.com's CRM suite and Chatter enterprise social networking component.

China remains the largest culprit, with 41 percent of fourth-quarter observed attack traffic originating in the country, up from 33 percent in the third quarter.

Cyber warfare incidences jumped sharply in 2012, Akamai said, with the number of distributed denial of service attacks more than tripling from the previous year.

Microsoft said that Office 365 "net seat additions" grew five times compared with the same quarter last year, and that 25 percent of the company's enterprise customers now have Office 365, which is now on a $1 billion annual revenue run rate.

However, Microsoft isn't saying how many Office 365 seats it has sold. Moreover, the 25 percent enterprise adoption stat includes both instances where the suite has been widely deployed and scenarios where it may be used in a limited fashion.

New numbers show the cloud reducing IT costs, with traditional software and hardware vendors paying the price.

Geeksphone begins selling two phones, the Keon and Peak, starting Tuesday. These lower-budget models are geared for programmers building Web apps for Mozilla's open-source OS.

 
The opening screen of Firefox OS running on a Geeksphone Keon.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Revenue for the Microsoft Business Division (MBD) in the first quarter was $6.1 billion, 5 percent above 2012's first quarter when adjustments for a free Office upgrade program were excluded. Office 365, Microsoft's expanded subscription program that it's promoted for both businesses and consumers -- and on which the company is pinning plans to drive future income -- will account for about 4 percent of the division's revenue for the fiscal year, Microsoft said.

En collaboration avec Greenwich Consulting, la Fédération Française des Télécoms vient de présenter une étude comparative internationale sur la fiscalité spécifique des opérateurs télécoms et les schémas d’optimisation fiscale des acteurs « Over-the-Top ». C’est-à-dire les services Internet qui exploitent les réseaux des opérateurs télécoms pour développer leur business