Stories by Marc Ferranti

As the migration of businesses to the cloud picks up steam, Oracle is intent on keeping up.

Zoho wants to be the operating system for your business. That's how the company puts it, and what it means is that you can now get just about any application you need to run a business using Zoho One, which gathers all of Zoho's applications for $30 a month per user.

While Amazon is raking in a good deal of the money spent by public-cloud users, Oracle is doubling down on its hybrid-cloud strategy, appealing to enterprises that want to put data and applications behind their firewall while taking advantage of cloud pricing models and technology.

Companies are refreshing enterprise software platforms for the cloud era and stitching together new systems to support digital business projects, triggering an uptick in IT spending worldwide.

It's not the server -- it's the system. That's the word from Cisco as it rolls out its new, M5 generation Unified Computing System rack and blade servers, triggered by Intel's release of the Skylake architecture Xeon Scalable Processor platform.

Make no mistake: Intel's Xeon Processor Scalable Family, based on the company's Skylake architecture, is about much more than revving up CPU performance. The new processor line is essentially a platform for computing, memory and storage designed to let data centers -- groaning under the weight of cloud traffic, ever-expanding databases and machine-learning data sets -- optimize workloads and curb operational costs.

The ability to tune out the constant barrage of pings and popups emanating from apps and focus on what really matters for our businesses and careers has become a competitive advantage.

Windows users working in tight spaces who are looking for a small form factor workstation with multiple display ports and solid processing power have a new contender in the market to check out: the new ThinkStation P320 Tiny.

Lenovo is taking on Dell EMC and HPE with its biggest portfolio refresh since it acquired IBM's x86 server business three years ago, offering a lineup of servers, switches, SAN arrays and converged systems intended to show that it's a serious contender in the data center and software-defined infrastructure market.

It's not just the folks at AMD who hope that that the company's Epyc server processor, officially launched Tuesday, will break Intel's stranglehold on the data-center chip market.

Before the advent of sensors in cars, phones, thermostats, refrigerators and factory-floor devices, information technology and operational technology were two different worlds. The Internet of Things is changing that.

At its Discover conference this week, HPE is pulling back the curtains on firmware security and advances in software-defined IT.

ServiceNow is bringing enhanced machine-learning capabilities to its Now Platform for business process automation, strengthening its base in IT management while making further inroads into other areas of the enterprise.

Intel has shifted its self-driving car efforts into high gear with a $15.3 billion deal to acquire computer vision and collision-avoidance company MobileEye.

Evolution inevitably entails the creation of new problems, and the big tech stories of the year show that this goes for IT just like anything else.