Business standards and compliance services provider SAI Global is benefiting from a strategic view of IT-enabled disaster recovery. SAI Global has brought advanced backup and DR best practices into play for its users and customers. This has not only provided business continuity assurance, but it has also provided beneficial data lifecycle management and virtualization efficiency improvement. Mark Iveli, IT system engineer at SAI Global, based in Sydney, Australia, details how standardizing DR has helped improve many aspects of SAI Global's business reliability.

Business-to-business selling on the Internet, or B2B e-commerce, is one of the fastest growing segments of the small-business marketplace. As businesses flock to the Internet to find vendors for essential products and services, B2B e-commerce is rapidly expanding, both in terms of total revenue and the number of small B2B firms operating in the digital space. Since approximately two out of three new jobs are created by small businesses, according to SBA estimates, the rising influence of B2B e-commerce in the small business sector has important implications for the U.S. economy.

Interest in the United States Federal Trade Commission's antitrust probe into Google was given a jolt with the commission's decision to enlist seasoned white-collar crime litigator Beth Wilkinson to head the investigation. "When we have the opportunity to augment our team by bringing on a lawyer with Beth Wilkinson's skills, judgment and experience, it is an easy decision to do so," Richard Feinstein, director of the FTC Bureau of Competition, told the E-Commerce Times.

Amazon's first fiscal quarter surprised shareholders Thursday by beating performance expectations. Investors sent shares upward even though the online retailer reported a 35 percent drop in net income. Amazon announced a net income of $130 million, or 28 cents a share, for its latest fiscal quarter. That's down from the $201 million, or 44 cents a share, it reported a year ago, but it's not as big a drop as was expected. Sales rose 34 percent to $13.2 billion, up from $9.86 billion at the same time a year ago.

Walmart is targeting an interesting customer segment -- shoppers with access to the Internet but perhaps no credit card to use for purchases -- with its newly launched "Pay with Cash" initiative. It allows a customer to shop at the Walmart.com website and then pay for the order at a local Walmart store. Walmart will then ship the order to the customer. "This offering is clearly part marketing and part gimmick," said David Cadden, a management professor at Quinnipiac University. Certainly, the timing is interesting, he added, in the wake of allegations that Walmart bribed local officials in Mexico.

Without Steve Jobs, Apple will fall from greatness, according to Forrester Research CEO George Colony. "Apple's momentum will carry it for 24-48 months," he wrote recently in his blog. "But without the arrival of a new charismatic leader," he continued, "it will move from being a great company to being a good company, with a commensurate step down in revenue growth and product innovation." Colony's case for Apple's decline is founded on an analysis of the structure of organizations by Max Weber, who is to sociology what Jobs was to Apple.

In the rush to play in the Big Data game, it's easy to forget the fundamentals. The fear of being left behind can cause enterprise IT teams to move directly into pilot projects with a choice of products and technologies that may not be best designed to solve the identified business problem. For example, because Hadoop has become such a popular tech buzzword, many organizations are racing to implement this Big Data platform before properly understanding their goal. A mismatch can often result.

SugarCRM has just debuted a controlled release of version 6.5 of its flagship open source CRM offering. In many ways, the release is an iterative change -- it does not represent the same major shift in functionality and user interface as version 6 did, when it was launched in 2010. In one key way, however, the new version is significantly different: The user interface is much more oriented to search technology, explained Clint Oram, chief technology officer. "If there is anything Google has taught us, it is that search is an essential paradigm."

Nintendo has reached a dismal milestone: For the first time ever, it posted a fiscal year operating loss -- down $458 million for the year just ended. It is an ignominious turn of events for the company, which created legendary games like "Super Mario Brothers" and innovative devices like the Wii. It's clear that not even Nintendo could withstand the paradigm shift that mobile devices have triggered. "What is ailing Nintendo is that the casual gamer has many more choices today than even a few years ago," said Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.

As testimony unfolds in the Oracle-Google lawsuit, now in its second week, it appears that Google's defense against copyright infringement is vulnerable. That is not to say Google will not ultimately prevail in the end. Oracle has alleged that Google's Android OS infringes both Java patents and copyrights. So far, testimony has focused on the copyright issue. Google's defense against the copyright infringement allegations has some holes, according to Kevin C. Taylor, a partner at Schnader Harrison -- which is especially evident following three days of testimony by Google's Android chief, Andy Rubin.

CRM is not a small market. Nor is it a niche sequestered away in a corner of the larger CRM market. CRM is a $13.045 billion industry in 2012, and it will grow to $16.694 billion in 2015, according to Gartner. No matter how you look at things, that's a lot of money. With a projected growth of nearly 30 percent in three years, it would be easy to assume that CRM has achieved significant penetration. But looking at the larger numbers suggests that CRM's market penetration is still tiny. Perhaps that depends on how you define "market."

With all the fabulous and exciting technologies to talk about here in the world of FOSS -- the shiny, brand-spankin'-new Ubuntu Linux 12.04, to name just one -- it always seems a crying shame to have to waste any breath at all discussing lawsuits. Discuss them we must, however, because in today's litigious landscape, a few powerful software giants keep coming back for more. The latest example? None other than Oracle v. Google, of course, and an ongoing saga that just keeps going on and on. Now well into its second week, the trial is the focus of global scrutiny, and more than a few Linux bloggers are up in arms.

Mobile carrier Sprint Nextel reported deep losses amounting to $863 million in the first quarter of this year, but the company's results actually beat Wall Street expectations. And since it began offering Apple's iPhone as of last October, Sprint added a net 263,000 subscribers. However, this has come at a price. To acquire the iPhone, Sprint agreed to a $15.5 billion deal with Apple to carry the handset over the next four years. "Sprint is finally stocking the iPhone, and that is helping bring new customers," said Ian Fogg, an analyst for IHS Screen Digest.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt defended his company's actions regarding Java and Android as he took the witness stand Tuesday during Google's ongoing trial, in which the company stands accused of misusing Java programming code in the development of its mobile operating system. Oracle, which acquired rights to Java when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, has charged Google with infringing on Java patents and copyrights for use in the Android software. Oracle claims that Google uses Java application program interfaces without a license.

In an initial determination, International Trade Commission judge Thomas Pender ruled that Apple was violating one of Motorola Mobility's patents for 3G wireless technology. Specifically, the ruling cited a patent that was issued to Motorola in 2001 for a "method and system for generating a complex pseudonoise sequence for processing a code division multiple access signal." The ITC ruling is a setback for Apple -- although these proceedings are hardly over, as the decision must be approved by the all six members of the commission.

Apple once again blasted Wall Street's -- and its own -- predictions on its financial performance for the March quarter of this year. The company announced Tuesday that it raked in $39.2 billion in revenue during the period, which is Apple's second fiscal quarter. That's more than a 58 percent increase over the same period a year ago, when revenues were $24.7 billion. Revenue estimates for the quarter by Wall Street analysts were around $36.67 billion. Apple previously advised revenue would be around $32.5 billion.

This might be the year we look on in hindsight as the time Oracle got its groove back. It is well known that CEO Larry Ellison thinks in 10-year cycles and about how the industry seems to morph like a caterpillar about every decade. He's not the only one. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has referenced the decadal cadence, and others have too. What's different this time is the size and scope of the change, especially for Oracle. You can start your timer with Ellison's unwise commentary at the Churchill Club just a couple of years ago in which he belittled cloud computing.

The tech industry loves the concept of new innovation to the point where product launches all too often call to mind infatuated elders showing off photos of their latest grandkids. But practicality tends to drive the manufacturing side of the IT business, with consistency trumping innovation. As a result, products arrive at market on time, retailers and their customers don't get grumpy, vendors hit their sales targets, and shareholders are happy campers. However, whenever you mix innovative technologies and manufacturing consistency, as Intel has done in its new Ivy Bridge processors, the result can spark literally game-changing events.

The hacker group Anonymous and other so-called hacktivists are the biggest concern for IT security professionals, according to a survey by Bit9. Its 2012 Cyber Security Survey queried nearly 2,000 IT security experts to gauge the current state of enterprise security and otherwise identify what keeps IT executives up at night. In general, 64 percent of respondents believe their organization will be the target of a cyberattack in the next six months -- and of that amount, 61 percent believe that attack will likely to be perpetrated by hacktivists.

Driving revenue performance and applying data in order to influence/generate buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle is not new -- it's an ongoing goal. Real-time marketing, which relies on capturing data in real time, improves revenue performance and is the optimal way to drive 1:1 customer interaction throughout the customer life cycle. However, real-time is highly complex and costly, and its transactional nature is not directly applicable to many industries, products and services. As a result, it remains an elusive goal.