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

Amazon.com is continuing the global expansion of its Appstore by announcing that developers can submit their apps for sale in another 200 countries around the world.

The latest batch of countries include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa, South Korea, the company said on Wednesday. The apps that developers submit and the Appstore for Android itself will become available to consumers in those countries in the "coming months", according to Amazon.

Americans are so fixated on social networks that they spend an average of 16 minutes out of every hour on them, according to a study by Experian Marketing Services.

In the U.S., 27% of users' time online is spent on forums and social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Experian said. Experian included both desktop and mobile users in its study.

Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting small businesses due to their less sophisticated defenses, according to a new report from Symantec.

Companies with 250 employees or less absorbed 18 percent of targeted cyber attacks in 2011, but the figure jumped to 31 percent in 2012, Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report 2013, released on Tuesday.

In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.

Citrix announced the donation Monday at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, being held this week in San Francisco.

The Linux Foundation will support continued development and maintenance of Xen. As a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, the newly named Xen Project will get support infrastructure and guidance from the nonprofit foundation.

Expanding beyond its own OpenStack hosted services, Rackspace is offering to build OpenStack deployments for other hosting providers as well, such as telecommunication companies.

"We're getting into the business of helping large service providers become cloud providers," said Scott Sanchez, Rackspace's director of strategy. "We're taking all of our accumulated knowledge around how to be a successful cloud provider and we're delivering that to service providers around the world."

Sage annonce une mise à jour de ses solutions de CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SageCRM.com et Sage 100 CRM.

Microsoft is pushing Azure cloud service to the 5,000 attendees at its management conference this week, encouraging them to take advantage of the system now for specific tasks but to keep in mind that it fits into a full-blown hybrid-cloud framework that may become more attractive to them over time.

During the keynote of Microsoft Management Summit 2013 the company announced that customers can now use Active Directory that is based within the Azure cloud to gate access to resources hosted there.

Dropbox, whose cloud storage and file-sharing application has been adopted by millions of consumers, will add single sign-on (SSO), its latest feature for businesses as it seeks to penetrate the workplace market.

The company announced on Wednesday that its product will let IT departments tie it to their identity authentication systems. That way, IT departments will be able to include Dropbox in the set of applications that end-users log on to automatically when they sign in once with their main credentials.

SFR VISE LES TPE AVEC LA BOX PRO

Parallèlement à une exploitation grand public de son offre triple-play autour d’une set-top box, SFR a monté une déclinaison orientée TPE jusqu’à 10 salariés, entrepreneurs, professions libérales, artisans et commerçants.

More than six out of 10 companies allow or mandate the use of employee-owned mobile devices for work in order to increase productivity, according to a survey.

While the BYOD (bring your own device) push has been at the forefront of press coverage, the majority of companies still provide at least a subset of devices to employees.

Two stalwarts in the enterprise IT market joined forces today to release a unified communications stack that integrates hardware from EMC, virtualization technology from VMware and communications apps from Avaya.

Salesforce.com is giving customers and partners access to a new set of tools and services for building mobile applications on its cloud platform.

VMware's Zimbra division has provided a preview of some of the enhancements it's working on for the next major release of the ZCS (Zimbra Collaboration Server), including an HTML5 Web client interface for both online and offline access to the product.

Currently, ZCS has both a Web interface and a desktop application, but the goal is to merge the two experiences so that users will be able to work both online and offline via the same client interface.

A l’issue d’une année 2012 marquée par un recul généralisé du chiffre d’affaires des opérateurs nationaux, Completel rend une copie autrement plus convaincante et revendique le statut d’exception dans le paysage français des télécoms.

Le groupe d’utilisateurs Java Paris JUG a publié les résultats d’une enquête en ligne sur l’utilisation du cloud en entreprise par des développeurs et architectes informatiques.

Sans surprise, 68% des 429 professionnels interrogés entre février et mars jugent le cloud « utile pour certaines utilisations », mais ils ne sont pas plus de 22% à considérer « indispensable » l’informatique en nuage.

Alcatel-Lucent is promising more manageable cloud computing through Nuage Networks, an internal startup that is making its formal debut on Tuesday.

Nuage has been Alcatel's wholly owned vehicle for developing its SDN (software-defined networking) platform, called VSP (Virtualized Services Platform). The venture, based in Silicon Valley and led by several longtime Alcatel executives, is unveiling VSP at an event on Tuesday in Santa Clara, California.

More than 75 percent of corporations have policies that prohibit the use of consumer OFS (online file sharing) and collaboration tools, yet employee use of the services is still rampant, according to an Enterprise Strategy Group survey.

"The thing is, IT had control of the data in the past. Now, it has only been three years since this [OFS] market has taken off and now data is everywhere," said Terri McClure, who spoke at SNW here Tuesday.

Three years from now, tablet computers will outsell traditional Windows PCs, and do so by a whopping 72 percent, according to the latest projections from Gartner. In between, PC shipments drop at ever faster rates.

Some of that decline will be made up by the faster growth in "ultramobiles," the new breed of Windows 8 devices such as Microsoft Surface Pro. But the PC decline is permanent, reflecting a "long-term change in user behavior," according to the Gartner statement.

The percentage of North American companies using SIP or Session Initiation Protocol trunking and traditional T-1s will just about equalize in two years, marking a dramatic shift in technology used for external corporate communications.

Of the 278 companies responding to an Infonetics Research survey, 58% say they will use at least some SIP trunks in 2015 while 55% say they will use will use at least some T-1s.

Avaya unified communications products can get along with Microsoft's Lync Server, and many customers will probably choose to deploy both rather than just one, says Avaya's CEO.

Despite what he sees as shortcomings of Microsoft's real-time communications platform, businesses will see value to some of its features, and supplement those with products from Avaya, says Avaya chief Kevin Kennedy.