Michael Hickins

The concept of knowledge management has been an elusive chimera to corporate America since the mid-1990s. Ever since employees came to be seen as knowledge workers, companies have been searching for ways to capture and disseminate the stuff inside their heads. Companies have attempted to accomplish this through a variety of applications, from simple e-mail […]

Health care benefits giant Aetna has just spent approximately $500,000 on a data intelligence solution from CiRBA, internetnews.com has learned. Patti Schlosser, head of server and storage services, said the expenditure was justified by the company’s growth, which has been organic and through acquisition. . The company reported revenues of over $22.5 billion in 2005, […]

Postini, a provider of off-site e-mail security and management solutions has just launched Personal Archive. The service allows corporate users to store their e-mail and instant messages permanently, and enjoy real-time access and search capabilities within those archives. This could be a boon to network administrators, who are caught between the rock of double-digit growth […]

Sprint Nextel folded another affiliate into its operation, acquiring Conshohocken, Pa.-based Ubiquitel for $1.3 billion in cash. The deal allows it to solidify its coverage of several mid-size markets while effectively ending a lawsuit that its prey had brought against it. By paying just under a 2 percent premium on the last quoted price of […]

Qualcomm fired a warning shot in Nokia’s direction last night. Theirs is a tangled relationship: Nokia is a partner to Qualcomm in some instances, a competitor in others, and a litigious antagonist in yet others. In a filing with the SEC, and again in a conference call with reporters, Qualcomm said that negotiations for renewing […]

Novell today announced the acquisition of network security solutions provider e-Security for $72 million in cash. Novell Chairman and CEO Jack Messman said that the deal would bump his company’s annual revenues by $20 million. But more importantly, he said during a noon conference call, the deal closes an important gap in Novell’s overall security […]

Voice over IP company Vonage announced that the interim tag has been removed from Michael Tribolet’s position as president of Vonage America. Tribolet had been acting president since January 2006. This move is no surprise, as the Holmdel, N.J.-based company overhauls its executive team in preparation for its IPO. Vonage founder and chairman Jeffrey Citron […]

Demonstrating its commitment to enterprise-level business, Google announced Google OneBox for Enterprise, which it says represents a significant upgrade to its Google Search Appliance, launched last May. Its determination in this arena is bearing fruit: Google said it has more than 3,000 active enterprise customers, and that revenues at its Google Enterprise division doubled from […]

NetContinuum is announcing a new version of its Web application firewall that speeds up sessions while reducing network installation and configuration burdens. The primary objection to installing proxy servers has been that they slow down transaction processes. NetContinuum CEO Varun Nagaraj told internetnews.com that the new NC-1100, to be rolled out next month, will reduce […]

Helio, a wannabe provider of wireless cool, launching “sometime this spring” (the official launch date is strictly hush-hush), has inked a content deal with Yahoo while it continues to build buzz among the young, mobile users it hopes to attract. “We want to appeal to them as the new mobile brand,” said Rick Heineman, director […]

On-demand ERP vendor Intacct will announce next week that it has received the coveted SAS 70 certification, internetnews.com has learned. The company is confident that this accreditation will be a springboard for Intacct to win ERP deals with small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) that link to larger companies’ supply chains. “That part of the SMB […]

Wireless system developer Qualcomm just couldn’t wait to get its arms around Flarion, the inventor of FLASH-OFDM for mobile broadband Internet protocol (IP) services that it acquired in the summer of 2005. The companies began planning and making decisions together during the mandatory premerger waiting period. That’s a no-no with the antitrust authorities in the […]