<a href="http://www.salesforce.com">Salesforce</a>, the not-so-little cloud CRM company that could, is furthering its play to bring everybody everywhere into the fold with the launch of Salesforce Files Connect, a new tool that brings files from on-premises Microsoft SharePoint into a company's cloud workflow.
A lot of businesses trust cloud sync-and-store provider Box, but they trust a lot of other solutions, too, for things like identity, data loss protection and digital rights management.
IBM Watson, apparently not content with its Jeopardy winnings, is looking for work. After a lot of buildup, Watson Analytics, the natural language business intelligence tool based on Big Blue's famed AI, is now available in beta under a freemium model where it's free to get started -- but the really powerful analytics are going to cost you.
Dropbox, the sync-and-share startup so popular it essentially created a market category, is finally, finally opening up to become an enterprise platform with the launch of a new Dropbox for Business API that enables team-level app management and integration with third-party services.
Everybody wants to join the DevOps movement. Everybody wants their developers and their operations people to work more closely together and take advantage of greater internal IT harmony with the result of higher agility and a faster time to market.
It was all the way back in the Spring of 2011 that Google released <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC">WebRTC</a>, its nascent real-time, browser-based, HTML5-powered, no-plugin-required video chat project to the public. In the three and a half years since, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the W3C have been working together to try to formalize the standard, prepare the stable 1.0 release, and get it ready for prime time.
Welcome to the age of containerization, where an ecosystem led by startup <a href="http://www.docker.com">Docker</a> is leading IT organizations to ineffable peaks of efficiency, helping them scale their workloads ever-higher, and probably baking them a nice cake to boot (it's my birthday, I have cake on the brain, sue me). <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#qscrl=1&q=microsoft+azure+docker+networkworld">Microsoft</a>, <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2843473/cloud-computing/google-fights-back-cloud-rivals-with-price-cuts-advances.html">Google</a> and <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2847861/cloud-computing/amazon-embraces-docker-with-new-customer-tool.html">Amazon Web Services</a> are all tripping over themselves to make sure prospective customers know that <em>their </em> clouds are the place to be if you want to get the most from Docker.
In early October, Evernote CEO Phil Libin debuted new features designed to make the immensely popular note-taking software <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2691236/social-collaboration/how-evernote-will-become-a-full-fledged-collaboration-platform.html">friendlier to the enterprise</a>: Work Chat, Context and presentation mode.
Last week, Microsoft made huge waves when it announced that its long-proprietary .Net application framework was now available as open source, completely rocking the Redmond, Wash., giant's cross-platform strategy and public image, all in one fell swoop.
A funny thing is happening in the wake of the <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490179/security0/security0-the-snowden-leaks-a-timeline.html">Edward Snowden NSA revelations</a>, the infamous <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2601905/apple-icloud-take-reputation-hits-after-photo-scandal.html">iCloud hack of celebrity nude photos</a>, and the hit parade of customer data breaches at <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490637/security0/target-finally-gets-its-first-ciso.html">Target</a>, <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2844491/home-depot-attackers-broke-in-using-a-vendors-stolen-credentials.html">Home Depot</a> and the <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2845621/government/us-postal-service-suffers-breach-of-employee-customer-data.html">U.S. Postal Service</a>. If it's not the government looking at your data, it's bored, lonely teenagers from the Internet or credit card fraudsters.
Salesforce has a solid lock on the SMB space, and more forward-looking large organizations have moved to its cloud CRM, marketing and sales solutions, <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2115522/social-collaboration/virgin-america-salesforce-chatter-intranet.html">apparently to great success</a>. But for every Virgin America or Burberry, there are many, many more older companies out there with siloed-off, older systems; they couldn't get their data into the Salesforce cloud even if they wanted to.
Cloud sync-and-share company Box thinks it's pretty much nailed down its sales pitch to the enterprise: Keep all your data accessible to everybody on every device, with all the regulatory compliance needs of the modern enterprise.
Identity is hard.
Today, GitHub Enterprise gets what the company is unofficially calling a "Version 2.0" release, with major new features that make the on-premises code repository more enterprise-friendly. That includes support for deploying GitHub Enterprise in the Amazon Web Services public cloud, high availability and disaster recovery options, better support for LDAP and SAML, and updates to code review and project management.
Xamarin has launched a new program designed to get its popular mobile app building platform into the hands of America's students, because children are our future or something like that.
