Michael Hickins

The small- and medium-sized business (SMB) market has been an elusive target for technology vendors. The market is worth $404 billion, according to research firm IDC’s numbers, and that makes it a tempting one to tap. The problem is that SMBs, companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, defy typical marketing strategies; they exist in every […]

Microsoft  is introducing Windows Mobile 6 in the hopes of making inroads in the enterprise handset market. The new platform now allows users to edit Microsoft Office applications on their handheld devices. The company said this and other enhancements to its mobile client will help it gain traction in a market that has been dominated […]

UPDATED: Top U.S. accountants say Information Security Management is the most important technology initiative of 2007. A survey of more than 1,500 CPAs conducted by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) also showed greater awareness of private– and public-sector data breaches, as well as new compliance and e-discovery issues. Identity and Access Management […]

Electronic voting machines used in many jurisdictions might be headed for the scrap heap. Senator Dianne Feinstein said today that Congress should enact legislation requiring direct record electronic (DRE) voting machines to include the availability of “random, manual recounts” in time for the 2008 Presidential elections. Feinstein alluded to the contested result of a 2006 […]

The Open Office XML (OOXML) format that Microsoft  has proposed may not get speedy approval from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) after all. OOXML is at the heart of Microsoft Office 2007, its latest suite of office productivity tools. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker needs to get OOXML recognized as an approved standard so […]

Arena Solutions is set to add collaboration tools to its on-demand product lifecycle management (PLM) application. In doing so, it is throwing in with heavyweights IBM , Dassault Systemes  and UGS, which have been focusing on the collaborative aspects of product development and lifecycle management. They are trying to make the case that PLM should […]

Oracle  is hoping to become more relevant in the enterprise search space thanks to enhancements to its stand-alone search application. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, announced in March 2006, features support for searching Oracle data sources such as the Oracle Database and Oracle Portal, Oracle Content Database and Oracle Applications. The new release of Oracle […]

Business Objects has a new objective: to generate at least half of its sales in the mid-market, defined as companies with under $1 billion in annual revenues. The company, which makes software that helps customers analyze and improve decision-making internally and with trading partners, counts about 80 percent of its customers among the Fortune 500. […]

Microsoft  has delivered on half of its promise to build a bridge between its own Office Open XML document format and the Open Document Format (ODF) favored by the open source community and many governments. ODF, which was ratified by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in May 2006, is the format used in OpenOffice, a […]

Reporter’s Notebook: NEW YORK — The bathroom attendant at Cipriani, where Microsoft hosted the first of two events to celebrate the consumer launch of its long-awaited Vista operating system (OS), had a copy of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot propped up on his chair. I didn’t want to break it to him that Godot never […]

NEW YORK — As Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates ushered in the consumer launch of its Vista operating system (OS) at the MTV studios here yesterday, he also inched closer to his own exit from the company he helped create. Gates announced last June that he would step down from day-to-day corporate operations in 2008, by […]

UPDATED: In a move that may signal new pricing pressure on paid enterprise search, Google is adding several advanced features to its low-end Mini search appliance without changing its prices. The Mountainview, Calif.-based search company has added enterprise-level security and bundled its OneBox for Enterprise feature into the Mini. OneBox provides search results that include […]