Hardware Systems

Issuing corporate smart phones isn't just about catering to the preferences of the next generation. As a lower-cost alternative to company laptops, mobile phones might be better suited to the current economic climate.  read more »

A group calling itself the Cloud Security Alliance announced its formation Tuesday, with eBay and ING as founding members.  read more »

Fujitsu is aiming to almost double sales of servers in the next two years as it absorbs Fujitsu Siemens Computers and reorganizes many aspects of its servers business into a single, global organization.  read more »

The much-discussed "Open Cloud Manifesto," signed by dozens of vendors in support of cloud-computing interoperability, was officially released on Monday following several days of discussion in the tech media and the blogosphere last week.  read more »

The story, "Lenovo restructures as emerging market focus grows," incorrectly reported Liu Chuanzhi's current position at the company. Liu Chuanzhi recently was reinstated as chairman. The second paragraph of the story has been changed and now reads:  read more »

Pat Beemer, the IT director at Seattle Lighting Fixture Co., has a lot of orphaned computer hardware and unused software licenses on his hands -- the result of what he called "serious" layoffs at the company in recent months.  read more »

If IBM actually were to buy Sun Microsystems Inc., the world's largest maker of Unix servers would take over the No. 2 vendor. Unix servers may not be getting as much attention as Sun's Java and MySQL technologies are in merger speculation land, but it is the Unix market that could put the prospective deal on the radar of regulators.  read more »

Psystar Corp., the Florida company fighting with Apple Inc. in federal court over its practice of selling computers that run Mac OS X, debuted a new, slimmer clone Wednesday.  read more »

With a purchase of Sun Microsystems, IBM would eliminate its biggest competitor in the high-end tape storage systems market, gain middleware to help manage increasingly complex storage networks and possibly get a leg up on new innovations in solid-state disk technology.  read more »

As Cisco makes an aggressive play for data center market share with its California blade server, industry watchers speculate whether the vendor might also consider acquiring one of the big four management software makers to strike a potentially bigger blow to competitors HP and IBM.  read more »