YEAR IN REVIEW: July 2010

Samsung Electronics came to Canada to tout its Bada smart phone platform with a message: Bada means money. Developers get 70 per cent of sales from Samsung’s app store.

Telecom equipment maker Nokia Siemens Networks scored another win by signing a contract with Shaw Communications Inc. to provide network gear for the cable company’s new cellular system. Shaw said the network will go live late 2011 in Western Canada.

Dell Corp. moved to strengthen its offerings to businesses by buying Scalent, a maker of server virtualization management software, whose products would be integrated into Dell’s Advanced Infrastructure Manager.

Government regulators shouldn’t be heavy-handed in their efforts to force organizations to better protect personal data, research firm Ovum. It called for a “subtle middle way” on policy.

Service level agreements are too complicated, weighted down with hundreds of metrics, said an IT consultant. George Gorsline offered advice on making SLAs more meaningful.

A U.K. mobile software developer released an open source-based embedded database for Windows Phone 7, which some believe is an important feature missing from the mobile platform.

IT projects have a habit of getting out of hand. Ron Ponce offered advice on how to recognize the warning signs and decide if some or all of the project can be salvaged to regain control.

Ontario’s biggest beer retailer joined the outsourcing wave by signing a seven-year deal with CGI Group to provide IT services and lessen the load on its data centre.

Internet providers breathed a sigh of relieve when the federal telecom regulator said ISPs don’t act as broadcasters when they offer connectivity to TV and movie Web sites – as long as the provider stay content-neutral.

EMC said it will buy data warehousing vendor Greenplum, which one industry analyst believed is part of a trend by companies to snap up pureplay DW companies.

Websense said it is offering a full-featured downloadable version of its data loss prevention technology, but a security consultant warned DLP can’t be solved only with software.

Got a baffling problem on your network? You have to become a cunning sleuth to follow the clues. In some cases, experts say, technology can help, but in others you only need a good eye.

An IT expert and author told a Toronto audience how organizations can become more analytical than they already are. “Companies that are analytical leaders also have distinctive data,” Thomas Davenport said.

How should Ottawa frame its digital economy strategy? As the deadline approached for suggestions from the public, online submissions showed a wide range of ideas.

The governing board of the OpenSolaris organization has threatened Oracle that it will disband unless the software company appoints a liason to the group. Oracle acquired OpenSolaris when it bought Sun Microsystems.

Half of implementations of Microsoft Corp.’s SharePoint collaboration platform go ahead without a formal business case, according to a content management industry association, which causes confusion on the content management and records management sides of organizations.

Security on the Internet’s Domain Name System was tightened with the addition of digital signatures and public-key encryption to the root zone. But there were questions of whether it would also lead to more enterprises to outsource their DNS operations.

After a raft of complaints about its new iPhone4, Apple said it will give owners of the handset a free case to help them with reception problems caused by holding the smart phone in certain ways.

Vancouver-based infrastructure provider Peer 1 Hosting began offering a hosted business-grade e-mail service in partnership with Microsoft.

There’s no shortage of people willing to give you security advice. But the best come from IT pros, who came up with five tips to improve your security posture.

An executive of Infloblox warned that IT automation can cause some concern among senior management who misunderstand the term, often interpreting it as entirely offloading stewardship of a process or system.

Why learn about SQL Server in a classroom when you can do it on a cruise? That’s what Brent Ozar thought. Read why two dozen others thought it was good enough to sign up for.

Business intelligence started out with reporting. Now it’s moving into predictive analytics. CIOs told us how they’re leveraging the technology.

Toronto’s i4i Inc. won another legal battle against Microsoft Corp. in an ongoing war over XML patents after the U.S. patent office certified the validity of the Canadian company’s patents.

Meanwhile Apple Inc. lost its bid to criminalize “jailbreaking,” the practice of hacking an iPhone to install unauthorized apps on the smart phone.

We did a video interview with U.S.-based Forsythe Solutions Group Inc. on why it’s making a more concerted effort to capture a portion of the Canadian managed services market.

Some people put off decisions until next year. But while next year is when the IEEE will release its 802.3az standard for Energy Efficient Ethernet, an expert advised IT managers to start thinking about it now.