Stories by Maxwell Cooter

A software start-up has developed a set of tools to help enterprises move their legacy applications to cloud platforms.

The world's best open source projects are going to be under close scrutiny in an effort to determine which one is the biggest game changer in the market.

A PC engineer was caught red-handed by an undercover TV reporter in a perfectly-executed sting - even though the journalist was investigating another matter.

Blue Coat Systems has turned to the cloud to offer an analysis system that it claimed would improve network performance. The Blue Coat Assessment Service uses some of the functionality of its own PacketShaper appliance to provide the analysis.

Most businesses now use some element of cloud computing according to new research from Mimecast. However, security concerns remain a barrier to adoption, however 57 percent of cloud users say that moving to the technology has actually improved security.

Thin client company, Pano Logic has responded to criticism that rolling out its Zero Client across an enterprise could put too high a burden on capital expense. The company has introduced a new initiative, Pano Express, across North America and is ready to bring it to Europe later this summer.

SAN management company Virtual Instruments has launched a version of its Net Wisdom monitoring product. VirtualWisdom 2.0 measures the effect of virtualised applications on corporate SANs, including 0 includes instrumentation, measurement and analysis tools - the basis for performance and resource optimisation.

It's not just the new coalition government that's looking to cut spending, UK's CIOs are set to embark on a cost-reduction exercise too, according to research from Micro Focus. The company has found that 50 percent of UK respondents expected IT budgets to be cut again in 2010, despite the more favourable economic conditions.

More than half of European organisations believe that cloud computing will result in an improvement in security defences. That's according to a survey conducted on the behalf of IT conference 360.

It's not just Google who has taken the leap into consumer appliances. Just the day after the search company launched the Google TV, Cisco has announced trials of a consumer version of its TelePresence videoconferencing system according to a Reuters report. The company has also announced that TV channel ESPN will be using Telepresence to transmit World Cup football from South Africa.

Users should get more involved in helping develop cloud standards said the chairman of the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) in Europe. But Bob Plumridge said that the organisation was aware of the logistical problems facing users and said the organisation was looking at ways to help users overcome these.

Citrix claims to have cracked one of the limitations of desktop virtualisation - how to continue working when a machine is offline. Citrix has announced a beta release of XenClient, its client-side virtualisation product that allows users to continue working on virtual desktops even when they're disconnected from the network.

Double Take Software is set to offer desktop virtualisation to the smaller business, saying that the approach taken by the likes of VMware and Citrix is too focused on the demands of the large enterprise.

Open source data management company, Talend, has pulled together its data integration, data quality and master data management (MDM) products into one integrated release. The company said that Talend 4.0 would offers users higher productivity and lower operational costs.

Xen.org, part of Citrix, has launched a new version of the Xen open source hypervisor.