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.

Companies such as Google Inc. (GOOG) have recently embarked on major ad pushes. This month, Google rolled out globally an ad campaign to flag its Gmail service and Google Docs word processing and spreadsheets. It’s an unusual move for the Internet giant, which has done little traditional advertising.

On Thursday, Juniper Networks Inc. (JNPR), a maker of networking gear, is starting its first-ever global campaign to raise awareness of its brand. Its bigger rival Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) last week launched new radio, print and online campaigns promoting a line of products for small businesses and a new system for corporate computer rooms.

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Many big tech hardware makers are expanding into services. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last year bought Electronic Data Systems; Dell (DELL) agreed last month to buy Perot Systems; and Xerox (XRX) cut a deal for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), also last month.

Software giant Oracle (ORCL), however, is expanding into hardware, and has no interest in buying a services company, said Chief Executive Larry Ellison at an event for financial analysts on Thursday.

“We are really brilliant or we’re idiots,” Ellison said of his company’s $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (JAVA), a deal that is currently being held up by European antitrust regulators.

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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. (C) and BT Group PLC parceled out to offshore specialists.

But the days of 30 percent annual revenue growth from such work are over, a casualty of the global economic downturn and increasing competition in the tech services industry world-wide. Now, Indian companies such as Infosys Technologies Ltd. (INFY) and Wipro Ltd. (WIT) are racing to broaden the services they offer and compete for higher-level work that usually goes to larger rivals including International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and Accenture Ltd. (ACN).

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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 economy has started a “gradual recovery,” Chambers said Wednesday during a meeting with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors, echoing optimism he expressed when discussing Cisco’s fourth-quarter results in August. Chambers said that he bases his assessment of the economy on several factors, including the stock market, conversations with customers and the rate at which Cisco (CSCO) receives orders. Based on these criteria, he believes that the U.S. is coming out of the recession. He added that Asia seems to be picking up as well, but that he expects Europe to lag behind.

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The tech world came to a halt briefly on Wednesday as people watched, blogged, and tweeted Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs’s appearance at an event unveiling a new line of iPods. Out of the spotlight another computer maker, Dell (DELL), made a product announcement of its own. Sort of.

Dell offered “a glimpse,” to use its language, of a new model of its style-conscious Adamo laptop that is less than a centimeter thick. The computer, called the Adamo XPS, is 9.99 millimeters thick, to be precise. That measurement is the reason the company chose to announce its existence on Wednesday (Get it? It’s 9/9/09). The current model is 16.5 millimeters thick.

Calling this an announcement might be an overstatement. Dell’s press release was just four sentences long, and there’s only a single picture of the new computer on the Adamo Web site.

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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. Their announcements point to improved demand for products such as laptop computers and flat-panel televisions–particularly in Asia, where the Chinese government’s stimulus spending appears to be sparking sales.

The latest evidence came from Intel Corp. (INTC), which supplies the chips that serve as electronic brains in PCs. On Friday, the Silicon Valley giant–which earlier this year pointed to signs of recovery–boosted its third-quarter revenue forecast by 6 percent.

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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 (DELL) and Cisco (CSCO) Systems. There are likely to be dozens of new product announcements made at the conference, which kicks off Monday.

One company isn’t waiting. Arista Networks on Wednesday announced it has developed software for its gear that makes it easier to manage servers that run VMware’s “virtualization” software. A virtualized server can run up to 20 times the number of programs as one without the software, which is a big efficiency improvement for information-technology departments. But it’s also created a new problem: How do you keep track of everything running on these servers and make sure they can be accessed through the network, which is made up of physical devices called switches?

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Storage maker NetApp (NTAP) 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.

Georgens says that one of the things he will focus on is strengthening NetApp’s relationships with systems integrators, the consulting companies that recommend and install technology for customers.

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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. Seventy-eight percent of these executives said that they expected revenue to rise next year, and 72 percent expected increased profits. In all, 57 percent of the tech execs surveyed by KPMG expected the economy to have recovered by next year.

None of this is all that surprising considering some of the positive economic news in recent weeks. But 66 percent of the tech executives thought that the tech industry would recover faster than the economy as a whole, and only 17 percent said it would be later.

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Cisco Systems (CSCO) on Wednesday held a news conference with Warner Music (WMG) 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 still makes most of its money from sales of networking gear, such as routers and switches. But in the last several years, Cisco has expanded into new areas, some as far flung as consumer video cameras and big-screen TV systems for sports stadiums. The Journal wrote about the new businesses and the management structure necessary to manage them last week.

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Cisco Systems (CSCO) 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.

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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.

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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.

This year’s Black Hat conference, an annual gathering where security professionals show off the latest and greatest in hacking techniques and computer vulnerabilities, will for the first time feature an entire track on threats to mobile devices. Among the topics to be discussed Thursday are techniques for crashing an iPhone, and how to use SMS–the protocol used for text messages–to take over someone’s mobile phone.

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The Oracle (ORCL) 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.

Oracle didn’t disclose terms of the deal. But this isn’t one of the mega deals that Oracle has become famous for, the most recent one being the pending $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems (JAVA). Still, it doesn’t seem to be a tiny one, either.

GoldenGate booked about $100 million in revenue over the last year, estimates research company 451 Group, which reported that a deal was in the works last month.

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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.

The new data centers are being built outside of London and New York City, and are scheduled to open in 2010. When they do, the NYSE will have an advantage with “the most obsessive traders,” says Steve Rubinow, NYSE’s chief information officer.

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