Dan Muse

You may not have noticed it, but IBM is becoming a fixture for many small and mid-sized businesses. Once the poster company for Fortune 500 firms looking for big iron and custom enterprise applications, Big Blue might be more aptly named “Small and Medium Blue” these days as the company has gone on a two-year […]

Saying that when it comes to FTP software, one size does not fill all, Lexington, Mass.-based Ipswitch today announced the release of both a new home version and an upgrade of the professional version of its popular FTP client software. With the release of WS_FTP Professional 9.0, Ipswitch said businesses can transfer data and documents […]

If your business involves managing data, there’s probably a 50-50 chance that you use FileMaker Pro. A wholly owned Apple subsidiary, FileMaker Inc. has arguably cornered the market when it comes to simplified database design and management for Windows and Mac owners. About three months after releasing what it described that most significant upgrade ever […]

E-mail is the communications medium businesses love to hate. According to The Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based research firm, the average corporate e-mail user processes 10 MB of e-mail a day. That is expected to increase to 15.8 MB per user, per day by 2008. So how does a business, especially a small or […]

The last few weeks have been busy ones for Big Blue forces charged with capturing the small and mid-size business (SMB) market. In late April, it announced its desktop management services and its network resiliency and manageability services. Last week, IBM unveiled WebSphere Business Integration Server Express. And there’s no letup in sight. Today IBM […]

When it comes to tools to monitor your business’ network, you could pay thousands for products that provide granular details on every packet. However, if you are a 50-person shop, many of those solutions are overkill in terms of expense and complexity. On the other end of the spectrum are a host free or shareware […]

In a move to further its advance on its entry-level server competitors, Gateway today announced a new rack-mountable and a new tower server designed to function as a small business server or as an edge server for larger companies. “We are attacking the entry-level market,” said Scott Weinbrandt, senior vice president at Gateway. Actually, the […]

Small and mid-size businesses are either spending more or will soon be spending more money on technology in 2004, according to Boston-based Forrester Research. According to the company’s report, “The State of IT in the SMB Market,” SMBs will increase IT spending by 6.6 percent over 2003. Forrester defines small businesses are those with between […]

Many small businesses prefer to avoid relying on larger vendors whenever possible. After all, who understands their needs better than another small business? When it comes to e-commerce, the problem for some small businesses that are looking to expand their Web sites’ capabilities is that they may have to go a large hosting provider such […]

In an ideal world, competent technical support would come for free with the purchase of a computer. In reality, it doesn’t always work that way. Regardless of what vendor or service provider you buy from, you have probably experienced elaborate voicemail systems and long waits on hold that you’d swear are designed to make you […]

NetSuite was providing Web-based applications when it wasn’t cool. The San Mateo, Calif.-based provider of a turnkey e-commerce, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) package has seen the hype, the fall and slow ascension of the application service provider (ASP) industry. Like other Web-based application providers, NetSuite has had to quell […]

Looking to offer system administrators and IT managers a more complete view of their network infrastructure, Voyence Monday announced it will offer its network configuration management products along with Opsware’s server automation technology. The partnership appears to be a well-conceived marriage of convenience: Dallas-based Voyence specializes in managing heterogeneous network devices such as routers, switches, […]