Alex Goldman

IBM (NYSE: IBM) handily beat Wall Street estimates for its second quarter, despite continued declines in revenue across many of its business segments. The company reported net income of $3.1 billion — 12 percent better than a year ago — and earnings of $2.32 per share, topping analyst estimates of $2.02, according to Thomson Reuters […]

The provision of services though the cloud is changing the software business, according to Gene Hoffman, chairman and CEO of Vindicia. “The distinction between business and consumer is fading,” he told InternetNews.com. “Many business software providers have not dealt with individual users before,” he explained. “Now they have to deal with each business unit. They’re […]

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software continued on its tear last year, driving billions in sales despite shifting economic conditions. In a new report assessing the 2008 CRM market, industry researcher Gartner said worldwide revenue for CRM vendors grew 12.5 percent during the year, increasing to $9.15 billion. Some companies fared better than others. The report […]

SAP (NYSE: SAP) today announced new mashups that connect with nine Web sites, including Google, to offer its SAP Business ByDesign customers increased functionality with a single click. “Including preconfigured third-party Web services is a valuable enhancement to SAP Business ByDesign, as it improves user productivity and user experience,” Hans-Peter Klaey, SAP president of SME […]

Professional spamming continues at record levels despite the best efforts of security researchers, Internet stakeholders and law enforcement groups to kill it off — making spam seem like a business too profitable to die. Yet while spam groups do make money off their increasingly elaborate efforts, it’s not nearly as lucrative as you might think. […]

While Oracle’s latest quarterly critical patch may fix fewer flaws than previous quarterly patches, today’s release is notable for the number of flaws that can be exploited without credentials, according to Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva and a former member of the security center of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Two vulnerabilities rated a 10 […]

UPDATED: The Consumerist reported (h/t BoingBoing) that a teenager managed to charge $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 to a prepaid VISA BUXX card at a CVS drug store. How could that happen? Update A poster to Slashdot believes they understand the immediate cause of the problem. “What is interesting is that the amount charged actually reveals the type of […]

Business information provider LexisNexis is alerting customers that their personal information may have been obtained by a Mafia-connected criminal group. This is not the first breach that LexisNexis has suffered, but it appears to be the most serious. In a notification about the breach sent to the New Hampshire State Department of Justice and obtained […]

Enterprise software companies understand that IT managers have too much to do and too little to do it with and are eager to sell software to solve the problem. They are highlighting ease of deployment and management as a key a feature of their latest releases. For example, enterprise Web 2.0 provider Socialtext today announced […]

For enterprise IT managers, key pain points are insider threats, Web 2.0, compliance, and application security. Cisco’s bi-annual threat report, released today, delivers common sense recommendations to solve these problems, which are intimately related to one another. The most difficult to defend against might seem to be insider threats. The issue has certainly been in […]

NEW YORK — As ICANN prepares to unleash a wave of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) on the world, it is seeking comment from Internet stakeholders. A series of meetings to be held around the world kicked off today in New York. The new TLDs are generic TLDs, known as gTLDs. According to reports, some have […]

Old, unpatched vulnerabilities continue to be a source of danger for PC users, with F-Secure warning today that malware authors are ramping up their attacks on security holes in two major vendors’ Firefox plugins. It’s the latest incident of old vulnerabilities remaining unpatched and potentially dangerous. In its quarterly threat report two weeks ago, the […]