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Cisco Systems Inc. blew past its own forecast for the latest quarter, reporting its first sales increase in a year as it left the recession behind.

Improvement was dramatic "across the board," CEO John Chambers said Wednesday. "The recovery, from a capital spending perspective, is very strong."

The company also provided an outlook for the current quarter that was far above analyst expectations.

Social networks have infiltrated themselves into the lives of millions of Internet users. While some businesses have embraced the phenomenon, others are being negatively impacted by the use of social networks at the office.

Aside from distracting individuals from their everyday work and affecting companies' bottom lines, they are also negatively impacting their security.

Cisco Systems, NetApp and VMware are joining forces to bring new design architectures to market. The goal is to develop virtualized data centers that are more efficient, dynamic and secure.

The trio on Tuesday introduced an end-to-end Secure Multi-tenancy Design Architecture that works to beef up security in cloud environments by isolating the IT resources and applications of different clients, business units, or departments that share a common IT infrastructure.

Flanked by a coterie of gadgets in a private suite at the USA's biggest consumer electronics show, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers might seem like the proverbial fish out of water.

Yet the leader of the computer-networking giant had delivered a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show [and] was outlining its consumer plans.

It's all part of Cisco's audacious gambit to plunge into new markets, spend billions to snap up companies and partner with others, despite a sour economy.

The introduction of the FlipShare TV by Cisco Systems shows the networking giant's strategic foray into the consumer space is moving ahead in a systematic fashion. The FlipShare is a companion piece to Flip Video camcorders, which were introduced by Pure Video in 2007 and came to Cisco in the acquisition of Pure in May.

One of the world's most notorious spammers has reached the end of the road -- or at least a rest stop -- that could last for the next 51 months. Alan Ralsky, known as the spam king, was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in prison by U.S. District Judge Marianne O. Battani in Detroit. In June, Ralsky pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud, and to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Hewlett-Packard rocked the networking world Wednesday with the announcement that it plans to buy 3Com for $2.7 billion. The acquisition is expected to make HP the number-two networking vendor behind Cisco Systems and set the two companies up for a battle of titans.

"Companies are looking for ways to break free from the business limitations imposed by a networking paradigm that has been dominated by a single vendor," said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager for HP's enterprise servers and networking group.

Cisco Systems is moving the ball forward on unified communications with an announcement Monday of a new platform release. Designed to "reduce costs and increase operating efficiencies between and within global enterprises," Release 8.0 of its Unified Communications System features new capabilities for e-mail, customer care, videoconferencing, sharing documents, social-networking, and other areas.

Cisco Systems Inc. doesn't want Wall Street to interpret its forecast for its first quarterly revenue growth in a year as evidence that the U.S. and other economies are roaring back.

A slow improvement in orders is under way but the pace is still slow and the recovery is fragile, executives from the world's No. 1 maker of computer-networking equipment told analysts Wednesday.

In a move to push cloud computing into the mainstream, Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware launched the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition on Tuesday. The companies will work together to deliver business-ready IT that aims to simplify and accelerate virtualization and the transition to cloud computing.