Sean Michael Kerner

IBM (NYSE:IBM) is starting off 2011 on a strong note. Big Blue reported first quarter fiscal 2011 revenues today of $24.6 billion, for an 8 percent year-over-year increase. Net Income was also on the rise, coming in at $2.9 billion, up by 10 percent on a year-over-year basis. Earnings Per Share (EPS) were reported at […]

According to a new Ponemon report sponsored by Imperva, PCI compliance does in fact have a positive impact on reducing security risk. The report found that that 63 percent of PCI compliant organizations were hit by only one data breach at most. In contrast, 26 percent of non PCI compliant organizations were hit by five […]

From the ‘Security in Obscurity‘ files: With all the hype and excitement around the Firefox Aurora and the upcoming Firefox 5 release, it’s important not to forget that Firefox 4 has never been patched. That’s about to change. Firefox 4.0.1 is now available to beta testers (basically people that were running Firefox 4 Betas before […]

Sourcefire is expanding its’ network security portfolio with new technologies for both the high and low ends of the market. At the high-end, Sourcefire is debuting the new 3D8000 series, which is powered by their new FirePOWER technology. “FirePOWER is a set of technologies that have been put together in a box to increase throughput […]

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is out this week with a new release of its Coherence in-memory database. Among the improvements in Coherence 3.7 is new Elastic Data capabilities. With Elastic Data, flash SSD drives can be used to complement and extend physical memory. According to Oracle’s own benchmark testing there is virtually no performance difference by […]

When you buy in bulk you save right? That’s the idea behind a new procurement joint venture announced today by Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom-Orange. The two European telecom vendors will be pooling their buying power for network equipment and IT infrastructure in a 50/50 joint venture. The new joint venture is expected to […]

OpenStack continues to move forward. This past week, the open source cloud computing effort issued the Cactus release providing new capabilities. The Cactus release include performance and bug fixes as well as an enhanced authentication system for its cloud storage component. The Cactus release also begins the process of opening up OpenStack to an even […]

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is opening up a new data center in Allen, Texas this week. The Allen data center will — not surprisingly — be using Cisco’s own networking equipment, including a large number of Nexus 7000 and Catalyst 6500 switches. The application servers will all be running on Cisco’s UCS platform. There will also be […]

Attention Apple (NYSE: APPL)users, it’s time to update your iOS, Mac OS X and Safari installations. A number of the fixed flaws across all the platforms are derived from exploits first publicly demonstrated last month at the PWN2OWN security challenge. Security researcher Charlie Miller successfully exploited iOS this year, hacking into an iPhone. Apple’s iOS […]

From the ‘We’re Not an Evil Empire — Really‘ files: The OpenOffice.org open source office suite has long had a commercial version. Under Sun it was called StarOffice. Now Oracle wants to end OpenOffice.org as a commercial product and turn it into a community only project. That’s right, Oracle no longer plans to profit from […]

Java EE 7 has a strong focus on enabling Java for the cloud. Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is helping Java to achieve that focus with a new Data Caching specification which was submitted this week. Red Hat’s caching contribution is on top of a number other technologies that it had previously submitted to be part of […]

“RIM has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do email. It must be skating season in hell.” New York Times’ columnist David Pogue in a review about the new Blackberry tablet (New York Times) “At some point, litigation must come to an end.” Chief Judge Alex Kozinski denies the Winklevoss twins appeal in their […]