emc news from FierceCIO

A new IT consortium was recently launched to raise awareness of the need for service innovation and to increase the level of funding for services research. Dubbed the Services Research and Read more...

In most companies, information is scattered everywhere--in databases, in applications used by one or two divisions, in individual documents, and in a variety of spreadsheets. The sheer amount of Read more...

Web specs come and go, but it's not often that you see a laundry list of industry heavyweights getting behind a spec for IT management. But that's exactly what's brewing: Microsoft, IBM, Cisco

Flush with cash and confidence, Cisco today took the wraps of a deal to buy online conferencing company WebEx for $3.2 billion in a bid to secure the hearts and minds of the SMB market. During a

SML may be the most useful standard you've never heard of. The Service Modeling Language standard, an XML-based schema to define information about hardware, software, applications and services, Read more...

Aptare has announced version 6.0 of its backup reporting tool, StorageConsole, which adds support for EMC NetWorker, Symantec NetBackup and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. StorageConsole now supports 90 percent of the backup software on the market, making it, essentially, a catch-all solution for backup reporting. "Typically, enterprises use one vendor for disk to disk and another for tape. They might be using NetApp for D2D and EMC NetWorker to go from the NetApp system to a tape system, for …

EMC's Smarts division will update its Application Discovery Manager software to version 5.0 next week. ADM is designed to find problems with your software and infrastructure, and now it's being merged with the IT mapping software of recent EMC acquisition nLayers, officials explained. There are also some new database features, integration with BEA and Oracle software and new programming interfaces. ADM 5.0 starts at $50,000 and will ship immediately.

For more on EMC:
- read this eWeek article

Alfresco, the startup making an open-source enterprise content management system, said it will release a beta version of its Web Content Management product next week and will ship the final version by the end of this year. The product is Java-intensive and offers plenty of customization options. However, Alfresco is competing against behemoths like EMC, IBM and Microsoft--can they pull it off? Customers testing the system say it has some real potential.

For more on Alfresco:
- …

EMC and IBM are separately re-embracing virtual tape technology. The idea is to trick a server or network into thinking that disk storage is actually tape storage, which smoothes backup operations and helps to integrate legacy mainframes. EMC is doing this by acquiring Neartek for an undisclosed amount, which means EMC will probably phase out software from its current partner FalconStor. IBM's new software is the System Storage TS7700 Virtualization Engine, replacing its older …