Google's cloud-hosted search application for e-commerce sites has been upgraded with on-the-fly results that drop down from the query box as shoppers type their search terms, the company announced on Tuesday.
Amazon's new Cloud Drive online storage service allows customers to store music in the cloud and, in the U.S., stream it to an Android app or through a Web browser.
SAP plans to offer a version of its HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) software that will allow customers to upload data to the vendor's own cloud setup for processing, rather than deploy related infrastructure in-house, a senior executive of the company said.
Google has upgraded the ability to post comments and respond to them in its Docs office productivity applications, making the feature more dynamic and more integrated with e-mail.
The National Federation of the Blind claims that Google Apps lacks required features for blind people and wants the U.S. government to investigate whether schools that adopt the e-mail and collaboration suite run afoul of civil rights laws.
Google will start letting Apps administrators delay the delivery of upgrades to their domains to give them a chance to prepare themselves and their users for interface or functionality changes.
Several companies, including Manpower and Tampa General Hospital, are announcing on Thursday their adoption of Microsoft BPOS applications, pointing to progress the software giant is making in the cloud realm and also to new features and pricing models users would like to see as such software becomes a bigger part corporate IT.
As more sourcing executives consider incorporating SaaS solutions into their overall technology vendor landscape, the potential to significantly disrupt the current software market grows. And while SaaS adoption is expected to expand in the coming years, the challenge for sourcing professionals will be a lack of uniform adoption across the whole software market. In some software categories, SaaS will be a disruptive technology, in others the only option, and in many cases SaaS will have minimal impact.
Google will soon start letting Apps users buy additional storage for some of the applications in the hosted collaboration and communication suite.
In yet another sign of cloud-hosted software's momentum in the business market, Box.net, which makes a software-as-a-service content management application, announced on Thursday that it has closed a $US48 million funding round.
Google will intensify its attack on Microsoft's enterprise collaboration business with the release on Thursday of the Cloud Connect plug-in for Microsoft Office and with the launch of a trial program for the collaboration components of Google Apps.
Google has launched a program to certify that staffers at Google Apps resellers have specific expertise, knowledge and experience working with the company's hosted collaboration and communication suite.
Corporate IT departments are increasing their spending on hardware and cloud services, but not on new hiring in this weak economy.
SlideShare has added Web conferencing to its site for posting, viewing, rating and commenting on business presentations, documents and videos, the company said Wednesday.
Google, which has been sharply focused on strengthening its Apps suite for large enterprises, has introduced a set-up wizard that seems aimed primarily at small organizations with limited IT resources.