Stories about: Webex

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.

Computing in the cloud and Web 2.0 were cited as today's cutting-edge, game-changing innovations during a developer relations conference Monday that featured presentations by Salesforce.com and Cisco Systems.

In this groundbreaking awards program, Computerworld US honors 12 user companies and another dozen vendors that are leading the way in green-IT. These green leaders are virtualizing, videoconferencing, turning down the cooling systems and turning off the lights. Top honors this year went to Highmark.

Meetings are hard enough to run when the participants are all in the same room, fighting over the last chocolate doughnut. But any meeting you call, nowadays, probably has at least one person attending who works in a remote location. In some cases, everyone in the teleconference is dialing in. You may be great at orchestrating an in-person meeting, but running an effective teleconference requires new skills.

Even though they fleshed out their joint strategy on the stage of "Saturday Night Live" a year ago, Nortel and Microsoft have since shown that their unified communications partnership is no joke.

While parent company Yahoo mulls an unsolicited acquisition bid from Microsoft, Zimbra on Tuesday shipped a version of its e-mail and collaboration software suite that adds support for BlackBerry devices and Outlook 2007.

Not all the data-leak start-ups have been snapped up by the big guys. Here are five data-leak-prevention companies to keep an eye on.

Cisco made 11 acquisitions this year culminating in 126 purchases since Cisco's birth. It made three more acquisitions than it did last year, when it spent a measly US$256 million buying ho-hum technologies. This year was different, not only in the sheer dollar size of some acquisitions, but also because of the breadth of technologies it acquired. From social networks to broadband wireless, we take a look at what Cisco Subnet has named Cisco's top-six acquisitions of 2007. We also look at what Cisco should have bought and what Cisco may be looking to buy in 2008.

The world of business software continued its inexorable march toward Total Consolidation in 2007. If IBM was off the mark in 1943 when it (supposedly) predicted a world with only five computers, it might have better luck today with a similar prediction about the software industry.