Entries by Kirill Bensonoff

What Does Oracle Foresee in the Clouds?

In the world of IT, 35-year-old Oracle Corp. is one of the veterans. It also continues to be a big player, with $37 billion in revenues in its 2012 fiscal year. But the company knows that if it wants to remain a big player, it needs to be big in the cloud. So, this June, […]

Bill to Put Sale Tax on Online Transactions

The House of Representatives is reconsidering introducing a bill that places a sales tax on goods purchase online.  The Marketplace Fairness Act will allow states to collect such taxes even if the seller is from another state.  It is estimated that a total of 4 billion dollars a year will be collected by states if […]

When Building is Better then Buying

Google has been bucking the trend of building software instead of buying it.  But is that a good policy? “In the long run, it is cheaper to build and not buy,” said Justin McWilliams, a software engineer at Google.  Instead of buying commercial offerings, Google has built software from scratch to handle everything from their […]

Mountain Lion Arrives

The newest Apple operating system, OX Mountain Lion, is now available, and, while it doesn’t represent a huge departure from previous Macintosh systems, the consensus among reviewers is that the upgrade is well worth the $19.99 price tag. One of the most significant new features from the predecessor Lion operating system is Gatekeeper, a security […]

Why Hire a Virtual CIO?

If you’ve ever contemplated beefing up your data security, or offering a new, technology-based service to your customers, or just buying a new office communications system, you may have thought to yourself “I wish we had a CIO around here.” Of course many companies aren’t big enough to justify hiring a full-time chief information officer […]

Salesforce.com and Cloud Software

So far, our series of posts on major cloud computing players has focused on companies involved in the infrastructure-as-a-service market, the fast-growing business of providing raw computing power that customers can use to store their data and run their systems as they see fit. Another smaller but still very significant part of cloud computing is […]

Something Windows 8 This Way Comes

As you may have heard, Microsoft announced that Windows 8 is coming out October 26th.  This release has a little more weight to it than previous Windows releases.  It’s a cutoff point for Microsoft on both the hardware and software front.  For example, the new Internet Explorer which has a vast market share will not […]

The Gravity of the 80-inch Touch Screen

They say bigger is better, so the 80-inch made by Sharp must be the best touch tablet ever.  Well, maybe the 80-inch by Steve Ballmer might be better.  Windows 8, in theory, should support a touch screen of any size if has the right graphics driver.  That could be a game changer.  Smart boards already […]