Stories about: Webex

SaaS vendors, ISVs, telcos, and hosting providers in Asia are coming together to create powerful SaaS ecosystems that will accelerate the technology's adoption in the region, according to a recent research report by Springboard Research. The report was called SaaS Enablement -- The Emerging Ecosystem.

Cisco offered its vision of where the industry is going and how it will get there to 11,000 customers and other attendees at the CiscoLive! conference this week.

It's not incumbent upon Cisco to own a company like VMware to broaden its presence in the data center, CEO John Chambers said this week.

Cisco's approach to unified communications is a network-based, hardware-intensive implementation designed to provide support for more environments - like point-of-sale systems, non-PC workgroups and mobile device platforms - than desktop- or server-based strategies.

Cisco on Tuesday posted a solid third quarter, with revenues and earnings slightly better than Wall Street expectations. But the company was challenged in some product and geographical areas, and Cisco also felt the impact of softness in the US and European enterprise markets.

When it comes to running a business, our feet are firmly on the ground but our data and software are increasingly in the cloud. My burgeoning media empire consists of two people (my lovely wife and me), but to the outside world we seem a lot bigger, thanks to online applications. To get our tasks done, we lean heavily on Web-based apps, from office suites to calendars to collaboration tools that let us work with colleagues on the other coast. Better yet, many of the services we use are free--at least, in their most basic incarnations. That never hurts.

Qumranet has released its Solid ICE desktop virtualization product to general availability this week. The company claims responsiveness and administration advantages over thin client solutions based on the results of pilot projects for several large customers, and today's released version adds multi-monitor support, in demand in the financial industry.

Everywhere you go these days, people are using BlackBerries to check e-mail and set up appointments. But the march toward everyday use of more complex business applications on smartphones is going slowly at best.

Although some would trace back the roots of software as a service to mainframe timesharing, what we would now call SaaS, or on-demand computing, is really experiencing its second coming.

Once confined to marketing departments and media companies, the Mac is spilling over into a wider array of business environments, thanks to the confluence of a number of computing trends, not the least among them a rising tide of end-user affinity for the Apple experience.

Cisco Systems' Linksys brand may disappear sooner than expected, according to a top executive for small business at the company, although he wouldn't say how quickly.