Stories about: Yankee Group

Brocade's proposed US$3 billion acquisition of Foundry Networks this week would create a stronger data center competitor to Cisco while raising the stakes even higher for other Ethernet switch companies.

It's no secret that maintenance and support for enterprise applications is wildly profitable for vendors and, likewise, incredibly expensive for IT shops. Some of those IT shops, in fact, are overwhelmed by the cost and find too little return to justify paying for it.

Macs are immune from security threats, right? It's Windows we have to worry about. That water-cooler wisdom needs to be flipped on its head, security experts and IT managers warn. Microsoft has gotten its security act together with Vista and its current security-response program; meanwhile, Apple is fast becoming the company most in need of getting its security mojo going.

A good CRM package does you no good if employees aren't willing to use it. Case in point: IMA Financial Group, a medium-sized financial services company based in the US. IMA had installed a commercial customer relationship management system that "was flexible and configurable and attractive on the front end," says business processes manager Jennifer Hallam.

Enterasys Networks customers should be encouraged that the joint venture between Enterasys owner Gores Group and Siemens strengthens the vendor's product portfolio and financial wherewithal.

The last thing a collision repair shop needs to worry about is a data-storage crash. So when John Sweigart realized the software he'd been using to manage his business, The Body Shop, was no longer compatible with the way they were backing up data, he knew it was time for a different option.

The Wi-Fi Alliance celebrated the first anniversary of the 802.11n draft 2.0 certification last week, and said the faster Wi-Fi technology's "upward trajectory ... continues unabated."

Nearly 80 per cent of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the number that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said Thursday.

With the release Thursday of Hyper-V as a free download to Windows Server 2008 users, Microsoft is drastically undercutting the prices of x86 server virtualization pioneer VMware. But while Microsoft provides good enough capabilities for many use cases, there are still numerous reasons for an enterprise to choose VMware, analysts say.

Cisco this week added clarity to its Data Center 3.0 vision by enhancing products to participate in the virtualized environment.

Cisco plans to claim its piece of the virtual data-center pie with products that automatically provision, manage and optimize virtualized environments.