With a new range of hardware announced Thursday, Dell's is targeting high-performance and cloud computing environments that share similar hyperscale characteristics.

Software vendor MobileIron announced the release of version 3.0 of its Virtual Smartphone Platform today, giving IT shops the ability to integrate mobile management with other enterprise-based systems.

The new version costs the same as version 2.0, which is $4 per user per month, MobileIron CEO Bob Tinker said.

WASHINGTON -- Among the proposals President Barack Obama made this week to boost the U.S. economy is one that will allow businesses to write off all of the investment they do in 2011. But there's a lot of uncertainty ahead for IT managers interested in this tax break.

In a speech Wednesday, Obama was specific about when he wants the tax break to apply -- "in 2011," he said. There was initial expectation that the White House would ask Congress to approve a tax break that applied through 2011, with a retroactive start date to this month.

Arm Holdings has taken the wraps off its next major chip design, promising a five-fold increase in performance that the company hopes will take it beyond smartphones and into new types of equipment such as high-performance routers and servers.

Arm's top executives launched the Cortex-A15 MPCore at a press conference in San Francisco Wednesday evening. The name is supposed to reflect how much of an advance the chip represents -- Arm's current designs are the Cortex-A8 and the Cortex-A9.

While Apple has been unequivocal in banning Java and Adobe's Flash from the iPhone and related devices, third-party iOS application development tools have been allowed to flourish. Uncertainty over Apple's stance toward third-party toolmakers, however, has left at least one such vendor -- Novell -- anxious about the future of its iOS development platform.

Oracle detailed on Wednesday upgrades to the Solaris Unix OS it inherited from Sun Microsystems, offering improvements in such areas as virtualization.

The company announced Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, and Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2. Oracle emphasized that Solaris is designed to leverage large memory and multi-core processor/thread systems as well as offer high performance, security, and scalability.

HP expanded its IP phone and wireless LAN offerings for small and medium-size businesses on Wednesday as part of a broad set of product introductions for those customers.

Oracle's board of directors has weighed in against a shareholder proposal calling for the creation of a board-level committee on sustainability, according to the proxy statement for the vendor's upcoming annual meeting.

Google raised the stakes in the search space on Wednesday with the introduction of Google Instant, which will provide faster, more intelligent searching and results on the company's site.

The intelligence built into the Google Instant service responds to predicted queries based on just a few keystrokes. Google Instant will become part of the core Google search service, with initial rollouts today in the United States.

Leapfactor, an SAP partner and startup, today announced a cloud-based system to support mobile applications, including back-office custom applications for accounting and customer support.

Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday announced a low-cost, entry-level server for small businesses that bundles advanced features in a small package.

HP's ProLiant MicroServer is targeted at small businesses and is an inexpensive alternative or even complementary product to blade or rack servers, said McLeod Glass, director of marketing in HP's Industry Standard Servers and Software group.

Mozilla on Tuesday patched 15 vulnerabilities in Firefox, 11 of them labeled critical.

One of yesterday's patches addressed a problem found in scores of Windows applications, making Firefox one of the first browsers to be patched against the DLL load hijacking bug that went public three weeks ago.

Rhomobile will announce Wednesday version 2.0 of its development-as-a-service platform for building smartphone applications.

RhoHub 2.0 is a SaaS platform enabling online development of native applications for Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Google Android phones. RhoHub applications can be hosted via Heroku hosting infrastructure. Ruby and HTML development are supported on RhoHub, which leverages the Model View Controller paradigm.