Dan Muse

The IT skills gap covers a lot of ground. From artificial intelligence to the Internet of Things to cloud infrastructure to cybersecurity, businesses list hiring and retention as top concerns. In its “Assessing the IT Skills Gap” research released in May, CompTIA reported that nearly half of the 600 U.S. respondents surveyed said that the […]

More than one in three businesses have no policies concerning the use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in the workplace, according to a new survey from advertising firm Russell Herder and law firm Ethos Business Law. The survey, “Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks,” was compiled from interviews of […]

To paraphrase the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, the World Wide Web moves moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it. If you haven’t been looking around lately, you might just miss the next evolutionary stage of the Web — the Semantic Web or Linked Data […]

Intacct, like many veteran Web-based applications vendors that launched in the late ’90s, has had to wait a bit for the small and mid-sized business market to catch on to the benefits and reliability of hosted software. However, the San Jose, Calif.-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) accounting application provider has waited it out and is now gaining […]

Quantifying what the “M” in SMB means has never been a precise — or consistent from vendor to vendor — exercise. However, HP is trying to clear up things when it states that mid-sized businesses are those with between 100 and 999 employees. Targeting what it says is a burgeoning growth at those mid-market firms, […]

After years of false starts, the online storage market is suddenly for real. Vendors such as Dell, IBM, EMC and Google have been gobbling up online vendors faster than you can say “software as a service.” Symantec Corp. entered the fray today. But rather than go the acquisition route, the security and disaster recovery company […]

Server and storage virtualizationtechnologies offer IT managers the capability to more effectively allocate their data center resources. However, monitoring and managing a virtual infrastructure isn’t without its challenges when it comes to understanding server and storage resource utilization. BalancePoint maps your virtual infrastructure and uses a green light, yellow light, red light approach to show […]

In a move it says will help small businesses tap the power of customer data with the sophistication that large enterprises enjoy, Microsoft today announced it is offering Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager as a standalone product. “There are 40 million small businesses worldwide according to IDC, and they face the same challenges as big […]

When it comes to storage and servers, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” might be an apt anthem. After all, storage demands and the need to effectively manage all that data are growing faster than you can say terabytes. And a server isn’t simply a physical box anymore, thanks to virtualization technology. Noting storage […]

IBM, and other blade server vendors, have been courting the small and mid-sized business market for years. Back in 2004, in fact, Big Blue reported that 30 percent of its blade sales came from SMBs (see IBM Cuts Blade Servers for SMBs). However, until this week IBM didn’t have a BladeCenter offering designed expressly for […]

With Fibre Channel in place and iSCSI gaining ground on the IP front, why the need for FCoE? “Today we have separate networks for storage and traffic in the data center,” Brian Garrett an analyst is Enterprise Strategy Group, said. “For enterprise-class applications, FC is the king. For general purpose networking, Ethernet rules.” The problem […]

The lack of an official, ratified standard isn’t slowing the stream of 802.11n wireless products. Even though the current draft specification isn’t expected to be voted on by the IEEE until January, vendors continue to ship products to meet what they say is growing demand for greater wireless throughput. Draft 802.11n products promise speeds substantially […]