The economy moves to the top of the IT agenda while VMware reasserts its leadership over all things virtualization

Latest Wave of Economic News Holds Up 2009 IT Budget Planning
Right about now everybody is trying to take their best guess about the IT budget needs for 2009. But with waves of unsettling news emanating from out of Wall Street and major vendor such as Dell and Ingram Micro sending out negative signals, it looks like a lot of people are hunkering down. The only exception to that appears to be security spending. And just to make things a little more complicated, it looks like database and SAP professionals are going to cost a little more.

VMware Sets Road Map for Virtualization
With lot's happening at VMWorld this week including a new alliance between VMware and Cisco, the EMC business unit set its sights on both the cloud and the client while others debated the merits of different approaches to virtualization management and the need for more security. Meanwhile, Sun took advantage of the virtualization noise to show off just what it can really do in this space.

New Server Designs Promise to Lower Cost of Enterprise Computing
Hewlett-Packard rolled a new server architecture for the mid-market at the same time that Lenovo announced its entry into the category and IBM added encryption support to its server lineup.

Intel Set to Unveil Six-Core Dunnington Processor Design
The battle over server processors is about to be escalated as Intel gets set to deliver six processors on a core that leverages 45-nanometer technology.

HP to Cut Over 24,000 Jobs
In the wake of the acquisition of EDS, HP is trying to get its house in order. And just to make matters worse, Hurricane Ike forced the temporary close of some of its Houston facilities. The good news is that HP says it will hits financial projections for the next quarter.

Malware Provider Makes its Technology Available as a Service
Just as vendors such as MessageLabs are enhancing security-as-a-service, it turns out that the bad guys are doing the exact same thing to allow spam purveyors to leverage botnet technology as a service.

Google Mobile Apps Start to Show Up
As Google gets ready to formally launch its Android phone project, new Google Mobile applications are starting to appear. Google sees Android is one of its most strategic efforts to date but others say Android won't change much of anything. In response, it looks that Research In Motion is moving to expand its base of application partnerships.

Second-Rate Software Still Infects Most IT Projects
After screaming about the need for quality aasurance for the past 30 years, all too often we still see multi-million dollar IT projects plagued by second-rate quality control practices.