On-demand Software

The City of Los Angeles government is deploying Google Apps to alleviate three problems: a crushing budget deficit, IT staff shortage and widespread dissatisfaction with the current office software system.

E-mail is the third rail of enterprise IT operations. You can mess up elsewhere, but bring down people's e-mail and you'll start getting irate calls literally in seconds.

Google Apps is a valid and inexpensive alternative to Microsoft Office, but lacks rich functionality.

Microsoft and Google aren't the only cloud e-mail providers setting their sights on the enterprise. Here's a look at some others.

Cloud computing is making it easier for startups to develop new technology, but once companies grow beyond a certain size they may find current cloud technologies do not meet their requirements.

The Internet has changed the way people do nearly everything--from consuming media to performing research to maintaining relationships to communicating.

Nine months after Google daringly launched a sync tool to link its hosted Apps collaboration and communication suite with arch-rival Microsoft's Outlook PC software, results have been mixed.

VMware and Salesforce.com are jointly developing a cloud computing service called VMforce designed for hosting Java applications, executives from the two companies said Tuesday.

Lawson Software announced a number of services and products Monday for running its software in a private cloud environment, following up on its recent move to support its ERP software on Amazon's public Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The travel industry wasn't the only one affected by the volcano that erupted in Iceland. Mobile-phone vendors and suppliers adjusted shipping methods to get handsets from Asia to Europe. Some McAfee corporate clients most likely cursed the company after a security update crashed the computers of hundreds of thousands of users. If you're a financial and technology wonk, then read on for highlights on this week's earnings reports from major IT vendors. Facebook's efforts to make the Web more social may result in some lost user privacy. But perhaps the site should bolster its security first. A hacker claims to have the log-in information to more than 1 million accounts, a security research company said.

Cloud's ability to make IT more agile is undeniable, says CIO.com's Bernard Golden. But once that benchmark is met, the cost effectiveness of the internal cloud versus public providers will be a key measure of success.

Oracle launched a product called Enterprise Manager 11g with great fanfare Thursday, and for good reason. The system management software platform is key to its goal of being a true one-stop IT shop for customers, now that it has entered the hardware business by acquiring Sun Microsystems.