Technology companies are launching big advertising campaigns as they wager on a pickup in business spending and jockey to have their products stand apart in an environment where new customers are hard to find and competition is intensifying.
Many big tech hardware makers are expanding into services. Hewlett-Packard last year bought Electronic Data Systems; Dell agreed last month to buy Perot Systems; and Xerox cut a deal for Affiliated Computer Services, also last month.
Indian technology-outsourcing companies no longer just want to serve their clients’ computing departments–they want to be them.
For years, India’s big tech firms positioned themselves as a cheap alternative to U.S. and European competitors for tasks such as software maintenance and database upgrades. They were content to take whatever work companies like Citigroup Inc. and BT Group PLC parceled out to offshore specialists.
Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers was one of the first tech executives to predict that the recession–then limited to the financial sector–would spread to the rest of the economy. Now he’s among the first to say it’s on the way back.
The tech world came to a halt briefly on Wednesday as people watched, blogged, and tweeted Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s appearance at an event unveiling a new line of iPods. Out of the spotlight another computer maker, Dell, made a product announcement of its own. Sort of.
Consumers are helping pull the technology sector out of one of its worst-ever slumps, and optimism is building that businesses may also start switching on their spending soon.
That upbeat picture emerged as some bellwether technology suppliers issued numbers that were stronger than Wall Street expected, though still reflecting the recession’s harsh effects.
VMworld, the annual conference hosted by software maker VMware, is fast becoming one of the hot tech conferences, in large part because VMware’s technology has become an important selling point for tech-equipment makers like Dell and Cisco Systems. There are likely to be dozens of new product announcements made at the conference, which kicks off Monday.
Storage maker NetApp last week named Tom Georgens its chief executive. It was an orderly succession–Georgens was the company’s president and chief operating officer, and a board member since 2008–but as with any transition, the new executive will try to put his stamp on the company.
Maybe it’s all the sunshine in Silicon Valley, but tech executives are feeling pretty good about the future–at least their part of it.
Eighty percent of tech companies said that business conditions will be better a year from now, according to a survey of senior executives at 130 tech companies by consulting firm KPMG.
Cisco Systems on Wednesday held a news conference with Warner Music to promote software to create and manage Web sites, one of nearly 30 new businesses the tech-equipment maker is getting into that it says has the potential to someday reach $1 billion in revenue.
Cisco Systems has overhauled its management structure in order to support 26 new businesses that the company says could soon reach $1 billion each and account for more than 25 percent of Cisco’s revenue.
Now executives work on committees–dubbed councils and boards in Cisco-ese–and the company makes 70 percent of its decisions collaboratively, up from 10 percent just two years ago.
The economy hasn’t spared many sectors of the economy. But if you have to be in business these days, software isn’t a bad choice.
The typical publicly traded software company is still growing, despite the worst recession in most people’s memory, according to investment bank Software Equity Group.
People are increasingly using their mobile phones for tasks previously performed by a computer. So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that cyber bad guys are turning their attention to the devices.
The Oracle acquisition machine struck again Thursday, as the software giant snapped up GoldenGate Software, a closely held company whose products help businesses tie together data stored in different systems.
Speed is critical for the growing number of traders who rely on algorithms to detect market shifts. So NYSE Euronext is building two new data centers that the exchange hopes will allow it to process trades faster than its rivals.
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