Stuart J. Johnston

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spent most of his time onstage emphasizing Office 365’s benefits for the small to medium-sized business (SMB) markets, the company clearly has no intention of letting its investment in online services for the enterprise languish. In fact, Office 365 is the replacement for Microsoft’s popular Business Productivity Online Suite, or BPOS, […]

“Microsoft announced Monday that General Dynamics’ Itronix division has licensed patents that the software giant claims to hold in mobile devices it makes that run Google’s Android operating system. The agreement is just one of several licensing deals that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has signed with purveyors of devices that run on Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) smartphone […]

Lustre-based clustered file system maker Xyratex announced it will begin shipping its ClusterStor 3000 storage appliance for high-performance computing (HPC) applications during the fourth quarter. Xyratex’s (NASDAQ: XRTX) Lustre-based ClusterStor 3000 provides a rack mountable clustered storage appliance that can be modularly scaled using what the company calls Scalable Storage Units (SSU), according to a […]

Research in Motion (RIM) posted year-over-year revenue growth of 16 percent for its first quarter of fiscal 2012 when it announced its results Thursday afternoon, but that failed to satisfy investors, especially in light of revising downward its guidance for the rest of the year and announcing layoffs. Instead, RIM’s (NASDAQ: RIMM) shareholders pummeled the […]

Storage vendor NetApp this week announced updates to its OnCommand management software to control, automate and analyze shared storage infrastructure, particularly in cloud environments. Additionally, to extend the new capabilities beyond storage, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) said it is signing up more cloud management providers to its Alliance Technology Partner Program (ATPP). The purpose is to […]

If the hints given out by a senior Microsoft executive during a speech on Wednesday prove correct, Windows 8 may be on store shelves in time for 2012’s holiday shopping season. Speaking at an event at Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Silicon Valley campus, Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development, reportedly told […]

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced Tuesday the first in a new line of integrated solutions meant to “automate, accelerate, and simplify” adoption of private cloud computing platforms for enterprise customers. The plan is to offer so-called “Converged Data Center” solutions to let HDS build infrastructure clouds that use tightly integrated, shared components, according to a […]

Microsoft shipped 16 security patches for its June “Patch Tuesday” event today, nine of them rated “critical” on the company’s four-tier severity ranking scale. That’s a big jump from May, when Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) shipped only two patches, only one of which was rated critical. However, that single critical patch fixed an important hole for […]

In its latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, analyst firm IDC predicts that vendors will ship 472 million smartphones this year, up from approximately 305 million in 2010. Further, that number will reach nearly a billion — some 982 million — shipped globally in 2015, the report said. Driving the move will be falling smartphones […]

The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday denied Microsoft’s appeal of a $290 million patent infringement verdict against it by a tiny Toronto technology firm, i4i, ruling that the standards for challenging the validity of patents are more stringent than the software giant had claimed in its defense. The main ruling, which was authored by Justice Sonia […]

Worldwide, server shipments grew by 8.5 percent to 2.3 million units in the quarter compared with the same quarter in 2010, when the industry shipped 2.1 million units, analyst firm Gartner reported Thursday. On the revenue side, gains were even higher, with sales growing 17.3 percent over the first quarter of 2010’s results, from $10.8 […]

In its first survey report covering the network-attached storage (NAS) marketplace for small and medium-sized business (SMB), analyst firm In-Stat this week said research data shows that seven out of ten SMBs that use cloud-based storage also use NAS. Additionally, although NAS used by SMBs comprises a smaller overall chunk of the entire NAS market, […]