IBM

IBM is going deeper into the cloud. On Tuesday, the Armonk, N.Y.-based company announced beta versions of an expanded commercial cloud-based service for software development and testing, on both public and private clouds.

Cloud computing for development and testing environments, the company said, can cut IT costs in half while improving quality, reducing time to market, and utilizing infrastructure more efficiently.

Partner Companies

Google is making it easier for IT administrators to switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. The Internet search giant on Wednesday made available a tool to help businesses migrate from Exchange.

The Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool will help lure more companies to Google Apps by simplifying the migration of e-mail, contacts and calendars from both cloud-hosted Exchange servers and those hosted at the customer's location. The tool allows businesses to make the move whether they have a handful or thousands of users.

Social networking site Facebook is opening an operations office in India, its first in Asia, to help manage rapid growth in the number of users.

The office, in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, will have advertising and developer support teams, the company said Monday. It will supplement Facebook's other centers in Palo Alto, California; Dublin, Ireland; and Austin, Texas.

The move is part of a push to create support centers across time zones, with round-the-clock, multilingual support, the company said.

Energy savings of 99% over previous methods probably sound like snake oil. But some math geeks have been able to find a way so that computers can use only 1% of the energy (and the time) necessary for some tasks.

Everyone loves clouds these days in corporate computing, and the concept will be a big part of the buzz at the CeBIT information-technology trade fair in Germany March 2-6.

Tasks that we used to do with a desktop computer are often being shifted into the "cloud," meaning that some nameless computer, often on another continent, is helping do the job or save the data.

"It's not just big companies like Microsoft and IBM that are going in for this. Quite small companies will be showing cloud products at CeBIT," said trade fair spokesman, Hartwig von Sass.

Iron Mountain on Monday announced its acquisition of enterprise-class content-archiving solutions company Mimosa Systems for about $112 million in cash. Mimosa brings more than 1,000 enterprise customers to the Iron Mountain fold.

Iron Mountain's latest acquisition gives the company an integrated archive for e-mail, SharePoint data and files, and an on-premises archiving option to complement its existing cloud-based archives. With the Mimosa acquisition, Iron Mountain is positioning the company as a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management.

Cisco Systems on Thursday moved to end its long-term relationship with Hewlett-Packard. With the two companies increasingly competing in servers and networking, Cisco decided to formally cut HP from its reseller program, effective April 30.

Cisco's decision means HP will no longer have access to proprietary information from its newly found rival. Although HP can still sell Cisco products to its client base, the computing giant won't be able to tap into incentives.

Salesforce.com on Thursday announced a private beta program for an enterprise collaboration platform. Dubbed Salesforce Chatter, 100 companies around the world are testing the platform that offers anywhere, anytime access to Chatter's real-time feeds via BlackBerry or iPhone smartphones.

Chatter aims to help companies understand everything going on in their organization and avoid missing critical information. Chatter is taking direct aim at legacy software such as SharePoint and Lotus Notes with a design that looks and feels like popular consumer social-networking sites.

IBM has created a high-efficiency solar cell made from abundant materials.  The cell achieves 9.6 percent efficiency, which is 40 percent higher than other attempts at natural solar cells.
The cell is made from copper, tin zinc, sulfur and sellenium opposed.  Solar cells have been created with greater efficiency but they made with costly or rare materials that could hold back the technology.

IBM on Monday unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. The company said the new product line is designed "to manage the most demanding emerging applications," including high-capacity smart electrical grids and real-time analytics for financial markets.

The servers are optimized for processing huge workloads of simultaneous transactions, data handling, and analysis. IBM said they offer "dramatic improvements" in price versus performance, energy savings, and server virtualization.

Energy Efficiency