BMC Software and CA have both teamed up with Salesforce.com to produce applications that are built and run on the latter's Force.com platform.

The tie-ups were announced at Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco this week, where BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and CA CEO John Swainson both joined Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on stage for the announcement.

Wheezing. Coughing and spluttering. Unable to complete basic tasks without falling over. Due for a serious upgrade or a one-way trip to the skip around the back of the office.

No, the Round-Up is not referring to that dodgy email server that you really should get around to replacing.

Adoption rates of virtualisation have yet to match the hype surrounding it, here Andrew Donoghue hears from businesses who've already taken the plunge.

Despite vendors touting the numerous benefits that virtualisation can bestow on businesses that adopt the technology, there is a flaw in the rhetoric that is hard to get around: not many companies are actually adopting virtualisation.

Google has taken the wraps off its Chrome OS for the first time.

At an event held at its Mountain View HQ on Thursday, Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai gave the assembled press a tour of Chrome, which showed the basic look and feel as very similar to the Chrome browser. The OS is aimed at netbook users and is designed for fast, lightweight computing.

How does a business pay less for its IT services when it's already getting them at rock bottom prices?

It takes a long hard look at whether it needs to be gobbling up so many services in the first place.

This week saw chipmaker Qualcomm taking the wraps off a range of hardware powered by its Snapdragon platform.

Among the devices on show was this Lenovo smartbook (pictured above and below) which runs the Google Android OS.

Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below.

What is it: RIM's second touchscreen smartphone

Salesforce.com has unveiled a technology that it says will bring the functionality of consumer technologies such as Facebook and Twitter to the business world.

Salesforce Chatter, pencilled in for a launch in the second quarter of 2010, allows users to create profiles and real-time news feeds to help them to work more effectively with their colleagues within the business.

Could some of the big names in outsourcing be among the victims of the much-hyped shift to cloud computing?

As businesses begin to host their IT systems in the cloud - instead of hiring outsourcers to maintain and integrate their systems - outsourcers could start to feel the pain, according to author and technology thinker Nicholas Carr.

A unified communications project is all too often a daunting prospect for a CIO.

UC is a broad topic - and a deployment can bring with it both unexpected benefits and unforeseen pitfalls.

In an exclusive interview, former MySQL boss and silicon.com Agenda Setter, Marten Mickos talks to Tim Ferguson about the state of open source, Oracle's plans to buy Sun Microsystems and the value of working with people who are smarter than you.

Marten Mickos is probably best known for his time as chief executive of open source database company MySQL, a position he held from 2001 until the beginning of 2009.

Here's a look inside Apple's latest Manhattan store in New York US.

Photo: Sarah Tew/CNET

Office 2010 beta is now publicly available for download, Microsoft announced yesterday.

New features include a social networking connector that allows users to incorporate social networking feeds into Outlook.

It's not just the technology that's important - how you account for its cost can also have a huge impact on your organisation at large, says the Naked CIO.

I am very troubled by a new trend that is impacting IT departments across the country and around the world. It has nothing to do with critiquing the pros and cons of a particular technology but rather strangely enough with the financial accounting of how we pay for technology.

Money transfer, location-based services and mobile health monitoring are likely to be among the most widespread mobile applications within the next three years.

The increasing adoption of smartphones and the success of app stores has ignited the mobile apps market (follow the link for silicon.com's run down of the top iPhone apps for business).

T-Mobile employees have been accused of selling millions of customer records and could face prosecution by the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office.

The data alleged to have been sold included customers' names, mobile numbers, contract details and the expiry dates of those contracts, an ICO spokesperson told silicon.com siter site ZDNet UK on Wednesday. According to the ICO, the records had been sold through brokers to rival mobile firms, so those firms could cold-call T-Mobile customers when their contracts were due to expire, in order to offer them alternative contracts.

Not every smartphone has a touchscreen - as Nokia's latest device shows.

The E72, pictured above, is the latest addition to Nokia's business-focused Eseries line-up.

Microsoft's cloud-based computing platform Azure has been given an official launch date.

Azure will be made commercially available from 1 January, Microsoft's chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, announced yesterday at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

Michael Chui is a senior fellow of the McKinsey Global Institute, the economics research arm of analyst house McKinsey & Company.

In an exclusive interview, silicon.com reporter Tim Ferguson spoke to Chui about the report he co-authored on how CIOs can overcome the significant challenges posed by the business world emerging from the global recession into the 'new normal'.

The Dubai Municipality is in the process of constructing the Middle East's first fully automated, driverless metro system. Once completed the Metro will have 47 stations served by 87 trains, and is eventually projected to carry some 355 million passengers per year.

Not content with a full fleet of robotic trains, the Dubai metro will also boast blanket wi-fi connectivity on all trains and stations.

Four men have been sentenced to prison time for being part of a gang that stole just under £500,000 from UK bank customers.

The men were sentenced last Friday at Southwark Crown Court in London for their part in an international criminal network that stole the money from 138 account holders.

Unified comms holds plenty of promise but businesses hoping to use it must first consider why uptake has been so slow, says Jim Mortleman.

Vendors may be making a lot of noise about unified communications and collaboration (UCC) but the promised panacea remains a pipe dream for most organisations. Despite having been touted as the likely number two strategic technology for 2008 by Gartner, it fell to number five on the 2009 list and does not appear at all in the analyst's top 10 for 2010.

AMD processors power the top three fatest supercomputers in the world, according to a new list published late last week.

The list names the fastest supercomputer as the Jaguar - otherwise known as the Cray XT5 supercomputer. Housed at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Jaguar can reach a performance speed of 1.75 petaflop per second.

In this age of mobile working, should businesses consider ditching their offices? Richard Leyland weighs up the pros and cons.

At the recent Workplace Trends conference, one speaker dared to ask: "Do we even need an office these days?"

The controversial ID project has hit another delay, with the government missing its own deadline to get the cards into the hands of Manchester residents.

The Home Office announced today that people living or working in Manchester will now be able to enrol their details for an ID card from 30 November, with the first cards issued around 10 days after enrolment.

Compiled on the M6 while travelling from Birmingham to Ipswich. Dispatched to silicon.com via free wi-fi at The IoD in London two days later.

I just chanced upon a news story about an innocent New York teenager who had armed robbery charges dropped by prosecutors thanks to evidence provided by his Facebook activities. The 19-year-old was released as his Facebook updates placed him at his father's apartment at the time of the incident.

Dell may be better known as a PC vendor but it also has designs on smartphones.

Last week the computer giant revealed details of its first foray into the increasingly crowded smartphone market with a touchscreen device called the Dell Mini 3, pictured here.

As the hype around microblogging builds, should your business join the tweet-fest or keep schtum? silicon.com's Natasha Lomas deconstructs this Digital Dilemma.

So you've heard about Twitter. You might even know what the word 'tweet' means. Well done. Your finger is well and truly riding the social media pulse. But here's the rub: should your business join the tweet-fest and set up shop on Twitter? Is microblogging the new marketing?

Last week saw silicon.com sister site CNET News.com sit down with Google CEO Eric Schmidt to talk Google Wave, Android and all things search.

"We're certainly not done [with search]… We're using a lot more about you; where you are, if you have a phone, your GPS, your search history, those sorts of things, to really move from, sort of, text to meaning. And that's not a solved problem and it's something that's a great challenge," Schmidt said.

While Microsoft's share of the mobile OS market may have waned of late, Windows Mobile continues to find its way onto shiny new hardware.

Pictured above is the Sony Ericsson Xperia X2 - the follow-up device to the mobile maker's first Windows Mobile phone, the X1.

Microsoft has announced the UK version of its search engine Bing has shed its beta tag today.

The UK localised version of its Google rival allows users to access UK-specific results and ecommerce sites.

Warning to iPhone users: you may find the contents of this first part of the Round-Up upsetting. If you are of a nervous disposition skip to the second part of the Round-Up. Thank you.

For the rest of you, here's what's been putting the wind up iPhone users this week: a piece of malware that can infect jailbroken iPhones.

With the government hoping to offset or reduce all the CO2 emissions produced by its fleet of half a million computers by 2012, IT is under more pressure than ever to go green.

As a result, the public sector has "stopped eating pies and put ourselves on a diet" when it comes to carbon, according to the government's green IT champion, Chris Chant.

All outstanding legal disputes between Intel and AMD have been settled, and the companies have signed a five-year cross-licensing deal.

The settlement, announced yesterday, ends antitrust litigation against Intel in which the chip giant was accused of alleged anti-competitive practices towards AMD. Intel will pay AMD $1.25bn in the deal.

Considering hitting the shops at the weekend? Looking for inspiration? Check out the latest in our series of gadget mini-reviews, courtesy of silicon.com's sister site CNET.co.uk, the home of technology reviews. For the full review and details, click on the link below.

What is it:11.6-inch ultra-portable laptop with ULV processor

Organisations that lose individuals' data could face a fine of up to £500,000 under proposals being considered by the government.

From next year, the privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will be able to fine companies that recklessly or maliciously breach the Data Protection Act (DPA). The Ministry of Justice yesterday launched a public consultation on the maximum amount such fines can run to - a figure it proposes should be set at £500,000.

October saw silicon.com cast its eye over the top iPhone apps for business. Shown above is the Skype app which allows users to make calls and send instant messages to anyone else with a Skype account for free.

Check out what other useful apps your iPhone needs in the full story here.

Businesses that want to use green IT to save big bucks need to look beyond the server room and start getting creative with their business software.

Companies should stop thinking that green IT ends with ramping up server utilisation or replacing desktop PCs with thin clients, Warren Wilson, senior analyst with Ovum, told the Green IT Expo in London this week.

HP has announced plans to acquire networking products maker 3Com for $2.7bn.

With the purchase, HP hopes to boost its networking business, particularly in the Chinese market where 3Com is strong, in order to compete better with Cisco.

The number of IT graduates able to land a job in the industry has slumped, according to new research.

A survey of 2008's IT grads around six months after they'd graduated found the number finding roles in IT-related fields has fallen markedly in some areas.