Mr. Rajeev Karwal, Founder and Director, Milagrow Business and Knowledge Solutions

Mr. Karwal shares his insights on the need of an IT services newsletter for the MSME sector in India. He also highlights the need for IT services for the MSMSE sector, Milagrow’s initiative in the IT services sector, the current state of awareness of IT in the MSME sector and also the future of the IT sector in India and the future technologies to look out for.

Microsoft says its testy relationship with open source is changing

Acknowledging the relationship between Microsoft and the open source community has been contentious, a Microsoft official Thursday nonetheless emphasized the company's embrace of the open source paradigm, even if it was not necessarily for altruistic purposes.

Selecting an Open Source Operating System

There's a large selection of free and open source (FOSS) operating systems available these days, and choosing the right one for any given circumstance can be quite a challenge. This article is intended to help you pick the best operating system for your needs and experience level. Although this article is geared primarily toward those who have little to no experience with FOSS operating systems, we've included some pointers for more savvy open source users – say, those who use a FOSS operating system at home and would like to deploy one on the job.

GIMP for Beginners, Part 1: User Interface

The GIMP or the GNU Image Manipulation program is a free and open source raster image editing software. It is very powerful and a great alternative to Photoshop.

RightNow tries to change SaaS contract, pricing game

CRM vendor RightNow announced a new SaaS (software as a service) pricing and licensing model on Thursday that it says provides customers with fairer, clearer deals. The company also issued a "Cloud Challenge" to competitors, urging them to adopt similar principles.

SAP does not expect mission-critical applications to move to the cloud in the near future, the company's chief technology officer said on Wednesday. Customers are deploying development and test systems on clouds using virtualization, Vishal Sikka said on the sidelines of the company's TechEd event in Bangalore. But they are not deploying production systems on clouds because they have key requirements around reliability, integrity, disaster recovery and security, which the cloud does not currently offer.

Sybase and SAP on Tuesday released the long-awaited first fruits of the mobile partnership they announced about a year ago. At the CeBit trade show in Hanover, Germany, the companies jointly announced the immediate availability of a business process mobilization tool for iPhones, Windows Mobile devices and Nokia Series 60 phones, as well as CRM (customer relationship management) software for iPhone and Windows Mobile.

Large size companies anywhere in the world tend to have access to good IT talent which can carry out an ERP implementation in a planned and managed way. But the scenario for small and medium size companies is very different.

Sick of overpaying for features they don't need or use,enterprise software customers are eager for vendors to adopt pay-per-use models that better align cost with consumption, according to an IDC report published last month.

Some like to say "antivirus is dead" because of the explosion in malware that makes signature-based desktop protection harder than ever, but start-up Immunet wants to bring new life to antivirus scanning through cloud computing. Founded by CEO Oliver Friedrichs, former director of emerging technologies at Symantec, Immunet is developing what Friedrichs calls "the next-generation antivirus product" that's based on a cloud-styled antivirus platform that will work with a fairly lightweight desktop agent to block and destroy malware. "Our goal is to re-invent the antivirus space."

Why is cloud computing hard? Top tech execs explain

Everyone's talking about cloud computing and security. But what makes it so hard? Top execs at Microsoft, Trend Micro, EMC's RSA division, McAfee and Symantec weighed in on the security challenges related to cloud computing.

SMEs Using Hosted Services Have Better Financial Performance

Microsoft has released its global SME IT and Hosted IT Index 2010, which investigates how small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) across multiple segments fared during the recession and how they use technology. The research finds that businesses that value IT as an enabler for better business productivity and effectiveness and those that use hosted services performed better fiscally than those that do not.

SaaS BI will be big in 2010

Mounting evidence suggests that in 2010, the hottest segment in BI (business intelligence) software will revolve around offerings delivered from the cloud, thanks to increased product sophistication, strained IT budgets and other factors.