If 90 percent of the world’s workforce were suddenly struck with a debilitating illness that rendered them unable to perform to their fullest potential, it would be declared a global crisis.In enterprises, that statistic is more or less the norm.Just 13 percent of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs, a recent Gallup report found—meaning that they’re “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.”The remaining 87 percent? Not so much. They’re either “not engaged or indifferent—or even worse, actively disengaged and potentially hostile—to their organizations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ZenbookAt first glance, you might mistake the ASUS ZenBook UX305 as a dark-gray edition of the 13-inch MacBook Air. It shares nearly the same design cues and size, but is thinner than the Apple notebook is at its thickest point, and weighs less. It also beats many of the current 13-inch MacBook Air’s hardware specs. And it costs less -- a whole lot less – at $699, compared to $999 for the MacBook Air.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.CudaEye Local+Key features – CudaEye is a cloud-managed IP surveillance solution that offers many choices to fit the needs of customers. CudaEye delivers quality real-time and archived video directly to browsers and mobile devices. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
French IT services company Capgemini is to acquire iGate in the U.S. for US$4.0 billion, in a bid to expand its presence in the North American market.The deal will boost Capgemini’s revenue from North America by 33 percent to $4 billion, making the region the first to account for 30 percent of its revenue.The iGate acquisition also brings to Capgemini additional expertise in application and infrastructure services, business process outsourcing and engineering services. Capgemini also gets iGate’s clients, including key customers such as General Electric and Royal Bank of Canada, to whom it can now cross-sell its own services.After the acquisition, the merged entity will have an estimated combined revenue of €12.5 billion ($13.6 billion) in 2015, an operating margin above 10 percent and around 190,000 employees. About 50,000 of these employees will be focused on North American clients.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Starbucks suffered what appears to be a major computer system failure late Friday.Stores in Boston, New York, San Diego and other cities appeared to be affected, judging from hundreds of customer and employee posts on Twitter. Some stores are giving away drinks, are only accepting cash, or have closed, according to the messages.In San Francisco, an employee at one store said they were giving away free drinks, though he did not offer many other details. He said he was not sure when service would be restored.Starbucks did not immediately respond to telephone calls and emails requesting comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Consumer groups are cheering the news that Comcast abandoned its proposed US$45 billion acquisition of fellow cable and broadband provider Time Warner Cable, saying it’s good for customers and demonstrates the power of Internet activism.Comcast’s decision, announced Friday, would have taken away a major cable and broadband provider in the U.S., critics of the deal argued.“The only competition consumers would have had in their living rooms if this mega-merger had gone forward would be who handles the remote control,” Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement. “Combining Comcast and Time Warner Cable would have created a corporate colossi, hampering consumer choice, competition and innovation in both the broadband and pay TV marketplace.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Indian outsourcer Infosys has made an acquisition in the area of cloud computing and invested in a personal health monitoring company as it tries to move into high value products and services.The transition is, however, taking time and in the financial results the company reported Friday its revenue and profit grew only slightly. The company said it faced pricing pressure in its core outsourcing business, which still largely prices its services around the number of people deployed on a customer’s project.As it expands into other markets, Infosys has agreed to pay US$120 million to buy Kallidus, a cloud-hosted platform for retailers to provide apps and other mobile content. The company also invested $2 million from its Innovation Fund in Airviz, a spinout from Carnegie Mellon University that is focused on personal air quality monitoring.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Acer’s new Aspire Switch 10 seems like just another low-cost Windows tablet, but its detachable keyboard dock turns the device into a shape-shifter that can stand in multiple angles.The Switch 10 is first a tablet, and it can become a laptop when attached to a keyboard dock. Acer announced two Switch 10 models at a lavish press event in New York, with the entry-level Switch 10 E SW3-013 starting at US$279 and the higher-resolution Switch 10 SW5-015 starting at $399.A brief hands-on with the Switch 10 revealed what’s most interesting about the device. Its biggest attraction is the detachable keyboard dock, which comes alongside the tablet. The tablet can be securely snapped on the dock, which has a 360-degree hinge that allows the device to be placed in multiple positions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has reported better-than-expected financial results for the quarter just ended, helped by strong sales of cloud services like Office 365 and Azure.Commercial cloud revenue more than doubled from a year earlier, the company announced Thursday, and online services like Bing and Xbox Live performed well.The results were hurt by the weak PC market, however, with sales of Microsoft’s Windows and Office software both declining. That meant that while sales were strong, profits declined from last year.In a statement, CEO Satya Nadella talked of “incredible growth across our cloud services.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google’s sales rose 12 percent during the first quarter, the slowest rate of revenue growth since 2013, while the amount it charges for ad clicks continued to drop.Total sales for the period ending March 31 came in at US$17.3 billion, missing consensus expectations of $17.5 billion from analysts polled by Thomson Financial Network.After subtracting traffic acquisition costs, the portion of revenue paid to partners that distribute its ads, Google’s sales were $13.9 billion, the company reported Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon has finally shared some numbers about its cloud business, and not surprisingly they show that it’s thriving and profitable.Amazon Web Services brought in US$1.566 billion in net sales for Amazon’s first quarter, it said Thursday, up 49 percent from $1.05 billion AWS generated the same time a year ago. For this quarter, AWS netted a profit of $265 million, up from $245 million a year ago.AWS is a $5 billion business “and still growing fast—in fact it’s accelerating,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying in a press release. He also called the group an “example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon.”AWS now generates nearly 7 percent of Amazon’s total revenue. Overall, Amazon’s net sales for the quarter, which ended March 31, totaled $22.7 billion, up 15 percent from the $19.7 billion collected in the same period a year earlier. The company posted a net loss of $57 million in this first quarter, down from the $108 million it lost in last year’s first quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comcast has abandoned plans to merge with Time Warner Cable, according to a Bloomberg News report on Thursday.The report quoted “people with knowledge of the matter” and said a formal announcement could be made as soon as Friday.The decision, which was not immediately confirmed by the companies, came a day after the Federal Communications Commission referred the proposed deal to a hearing in front of a judge—a move that had been viewed as a “death sentence” for the plan because of the time and effort it would have taken.The U.S. Department of Justice was also reported to be leaning towards blocking the merger on antitrust grounds should it have received FCC clearance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comcast has abandoned plans to merge with Time Warner Cable.Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement: "Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away.Comcast NBCUniversal is a unique company with strong momentum. Throughout this entire process, our employees have kept their eye on the ball and we have had fantastic operating results. I want to thank them and the employees of Time Warner Cable for their tireless efforts.I couldn’t be more proud of this company and I am truly excited for what’s next."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell this week extended its arsenal of data center Ethernet switches, highlighted by a 100G device with ports dividable into 25G and 50G channels.Twenty-five gigabit and 50G Ethernet are becoming popular options for data centers looking to fill the bandwidth gap between 10G and 40G for server-to-top-of-rack switch connectivity. Products supporting 25/50G are intended to scale network bandwidth to cloud server and storage endpoints, where workloads are expected to surpass the capacity of 10/40G Ethernet links deployed today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook’s mobile shift shows through in financial resultsIt doesn’t seem so long ago that analysts were fretting over Facebook’s mobile playbook, but now the social media giant is monetizing a user base that is increasingly on smartphones and tablets. In reporting its financial results Wednesday, it said that a solid majority of its advertising revenue for the first quarter came from users on mobile devices, the New York Times reports.Facebook gives Android phones souped-up caller IDFacebook wants to move even closer to the core functions of your Android smartphone, with a new dialer app called Hello that uses Messenger to call your friends. The company also says it can give you better security with enhanced call-blocking, and uses the Facebook database to identify callers, PC World reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Past political trouble in the U.S. isn’t stopping Huawei Technologies from selling its enterprise services in the country.The Chinese company, which was labeled a U.S. national security threat in 2012, has been effectively blocked from selling telecommunication gear to U.S. carriers. Government officials there are concerned about Huawei’s alleged ties with the Chinese government, even as the company has repeatedly denied the claims.Huawei, however, hopes it can still attract U.S. customers to its enterprise products, which include servers, storage and IT services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Qualcomm’s second-quarter profit dropped 46 percent, mainly because of a large fine the company had to pay in China for settling antitrust issues.The chip company also cut its revenue outlook for 2015, citing loss of business for its Snapdragon processor from key customer Samsung Electronics and a concentration of the premium market around two players - Apple and Samsung, among other factors.Qualcomm lost business from Samsung as the South Korean vendor decided to use its in-house Exynos processor rather than the Snapdragon 810 chip in its flagship Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 edge smartphones. The impact on Qualcomm has been large because makers like Samsung have decided to focus on newer products rather than legacy products. The chipmaker does not expect an immediate shift in its share of components in Samsung’s premium devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A developer edition of Box will allow enterprises to build applications on top of the company’s content collaboration and sharing capabilities without using the Box user interface or requiring users to have a Box account.The announcement of the Developer Edition at the Box Dev conference is the company’s latest step beyond its legacy as a storage, sync and sharing service and toward its higher calling as a platform company. Box aims to provide cloud resources like big names such as Amazon Web Services do, but with additional features that take more work off developer’s plate when creating an enterprise application.Since it went public in January, Box has been under scrutiny for signs of a path to profit. Box’s traditional service is up against competing products, such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive, from bigger companies with other ways to make money. That makes cloud storage by itself a commodity business with brutal price competition, so the company is reaching higher with more differentiated features, said Chris Yeh, senior vice president of product and platform, in an interview at Box Dev.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here