enterprise

ViVu raises $3 million for video conferencing

Video-conferencing service ViVu announced on Tuesday that it has raised $3 million in a Series A round of funding that was led by Inventus Capital Partners. Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Quest Ventures also participated in the round.

ViVu's service enables users to create, publish, and manage video-conferencing events from the site. Users can access the meeting from a PC, Mac, or smartphone. According to the company, its software doesn't require any "proprietary downloads." ViVu said in a statement that it hopes its service will be used for "online meetings, sales presentations, training sessions, and large … Read more

Manufacturing accounting program

BS1 Enterprise Accounting with Manufacturing provides a comprehensive look at all accounting aspects for a small business. While it is a great product, users must decide if it is better than the free version.

The program's interface initially surprised us, as it was a simple toolbar on our desktop. However, the Help file's instructions explained that this was actually an intuitive way of managing various aspects of finance. We were able to build and view all imaginable aspects of our business, from Accounts Payable and Receivable, to Stock, Orders, and Manufacturing. All popped up in small grid-like screens … Read more

Is it Postgres' time to shine?

Postgres for years has lived in the shadow of MySQL's media attention: the "boring" database that quietly goes about its work while its sexy Web 2.0 cousin wins the popularity contest.

Recent data from the Eclipse Foundation, however, suggest that Postgres may be ready to make significant waves in the enterprise, even if it doesn't make headlines.

In a recent letter to European Union's commissioner of competition, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos stressed that MySQL's target market is the emerging Web database market and that the enterprise IT market was never really a … Read more

Open source: Still waiting on IT

If I needed a clear sign that commercial open source is alive and well, reading Roberto Galoppini's remarks on the five Open Innovation Awards winners provided that and more. I used to be able to count every open-source company on two hands. Galoppini mentioned four of which I've never heard.

I'll feel a lot better, however, when we hear less about vendors writing open-source software and more about enterprise IT releasing open-source code.

There's no question that enterprise IT is adopting open source in droves. Gartner speculates that 85 percent of enterprises already use open source. (… Read more

Dell brings wireless recharging to laptops

That Dell is releasing a new laptop for business customers is the opposite of surprising. But the fact that it contains notable features not seen in any other laptops certainly is.

Most everything about the new Latitude Z is expected: It's yet another very thin notebook (a metric which PC manufacturers keep using to try to one-up each other), with a different kind of exterior finish (soft-touch, in this case), and comes in a black cherry. It measures 16 inches across, and is 14 millimeters thin at its most narrow point.

But you probably wouldn't guess that the Latitude Z charges wirelessly. And as far as we can tell, it's the first laptop to do so. Surprised that this is coming from Dell? You're not alone.

The wireless charging is handled elegantly enough. An inductive pad that's built into a laptop stand can accomplish a full recharge in "about the same amount of time" as a standard-issue cabled charger, according to Dell. While smartphone maker Palm has a similar (albeit smaller) wireless charging system for the Pre, and companies like Visteon and Wild Charge have debuted wireless charging accessories for phones, no PC maker has incorporated the idea until now.

Revenue up, but Red Hat needs more JBoss focus

At the recent Red Hat Summit, company CEO Jim Whitehurst quipped that "flat is the new up," but he clearly wasn't referring to Red Hat. On Wednesday Red Hat announced another strong quarter, with revenue of $183.6 million for the company's second fiscal quarter of 2010.

That's a rise of 12 percent compared with the same period last year. Despite the company's against-the-grain performance in a weak market, however, it may need to invest more in its middleware business to ensure future growth.

But first, the good news. Of Red Hat's total … Read more

Big IT projects fail. Open source can help

A large percentage of IT projects fail, and one big reason is the nature of the traditional software acquisition process. Buyers typically purchase software based on faith (demoware), with acceptance periods built into contracts to provide escape clauses if the software doesn't work as advertised. Open-source software, however, with its "try-before-you-buy" option, provides a better way to increase the odds of a successful IT project, while simultaneously lowering costs.

Enterprise software is hard, and made doubly so when million-dollar decisions must be made about software that has not been tried beyond a sales engineer's slideshow. It'… Read more

Enterprise cloud computing coming of age

One of the most interesting aspects of the weeks leading up to and including this year's VMWorld was the incredible innovation in cloud-computing service offerings for enterprises--especially in the category of infrastructure as a service. A variety of service providers are stepping up their cloud offerings, and giving unprecedented capabilities to their customer's system administrators.

In this category, enterprises are most concerned about security, control, service levels, and compliance; what I call the "trust" issues. Most of the new services attempt to address some or all of these issues head on. Given that this is the … Read more

Red Hat talks tough on competitors

Red Hat announced a range of cool new products and technologies last week at Red Hat Summit, but the most potent message emerging from the conference may well have been 'Diplomacy be damned!' Red Hat has generally opted to publicly ignore competitors, but not anymore. The company singled out Microsoft and Oracle, in particular. Is this a new, combative Red Hat?

Red Hat's DeltaCloud was the big technical news, offering a "common API to blend public and private clouds." It also announced a new Catalyst program to corral a partner ecosystem around its infrastructure products.

But for … Read more

InfoWorld's two minds on open source's value

Each year InfoWorld sets out to rate the "best open source products" with its Bossie awards. Too bad it has decided to cloud the voting with open-source politics, as well.

The politics reveal themselves when InfoWorld tries to settle on a winner between Zenoss and OpenNMS. (Why Hyperic isn't also in that mix, or Reductive Labs' Puppet, I can't fathom, but...)

The editors write (note: the emphasis is mine):

Although Zenoss clearly has the more developed feature set, our Bossie goes to OpenNMS. The reason boils down to business models. OpenNMS is a purely open source … Read more