EMC Announces “Heritage Trust” Grant Recipients

EMC has announced grants to three local organizations — the Centro de Documentacion de las Artes Escenicas (Chile), Help Georgie Go Digital (Canada), and Caffe Lena History Project (New York) — from the EMC Heritage Trust Project. The grants will support projects that practice and encourage the stewardship of cultural information in local communities. To date, the EMC Heritage Trust Project has awarded grants to 35 projects, and through the larger EMC Information Heritage Initiative program the company has donated more than $35 million to advance the conservation of heritage information globally. More

Circulo K Chooses IBM PureFlex over HP and Dell

Mexican convenience store chain Circulo K Mexico, a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest convenience store chains, has selected IBM PureSystems to upgrade and consolidate its IT infrastructure. With the new PureFlex system, Circulo K will be able to rapidly add new applications and bring new services on line for its customers. It will also create a high-availability back system that can speed recovery times and reduce critical application failures by up to 90 percent. More

CenterPoint Energy Chooses IBM to Develop new Customer Service Platform

CenterPoint Energy, an energy-delivery company operating primarily in six U.S. states, has chosen IBM to develop a new Customer Vision Platform to enhance the customer experience and drive operational efficiencies. The platform will consolidate services across the business, providing CenterPoint with a 360-degree view of its 5 million metered customers. More

IBM Helps ING Direct Canada Connect with Mobile, Social Customers

IBM is helping ING Direct Canada apply a Smarter Commerce approach to customer banking to meet the changing expectations of its 1.8 million digital consumers across Canada who are embracing mobile, social, and cloud computing. IBM is working with the online bank to deliver innovative financial services that improve ING Direct’s customer experience, including simplified account access across mobile devices and social media channels, voice recognition, and advanced security. More

Sutherland Global Uses VMware Horizon View to Virtualize 10,000 Legacy Desktops

Sutherland Global Services, a U.S.-based global provider of Business Process Outsourcing and Technology Enabled services, has deployed 10,000 seats of VMware Horizon View Business  Process Desktop to create a private cloud to service its global workforce. With more than 30,000 employees across 30 cities and 10 countries, virtualizing desktops has allowed Sutherland to transform its legacy desktops into a service to attain high availability, data security, and a flexible desktop infrastructure for growth and change. More

Microsoft Announces General Availability of Windows Embedded 8

Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of the Windows embedded 8 family of operating systems. Extending Windows 8 technologies to a spectrum of edge devices, Windows Embedded 8 helps enterprises capitalize on the Internet of Things with the platform to capture, analyze, and act on valuable data across IT infrastructures. More

Cisco Collaboration Doubles Down on Software and Cloud

Cisco has announced innovations that will combine the power of software with the intelligence of the network to drive video collaboration in the enterprise. The innovations give customers new ways to manage and cost-effectively scale video and increase B2B communications. The announcement includes upgrades to Cisco TelePresence and WebEx to advance B2B collaboration, transparency into all video traffic on the network, and software advances to make collaboration more cost-effective. More

Cisco Connect to Bring Business and Technological Innovation Exponents to Costa Rica

Cisco has announced that Cisco Connect will take place in the Intercontinental Hotel, San Jose, Costa Rica, September 10-12. Cisco and its major customers and business partners from Central America, the Caribbean, and the northern part of South America will present the latest developments in business solutions, networks, and connectivity. More

SAP Announces General Availability of the Personal Edition of SAP Visual Intelligence Software

SAP AG today announced general availability of the personal edition of SAP Visual Intelligence software to help business users uncover hidden insights from their data. SAP Visual Intelligence helps users unify and transform spreadsheet data to discover hidden insights and answers. It combines fast data manipulation with engaging visualizations and point-and-click data manipulations that allows users to organize and consolidate data the way they want it without any code or additional modeling layers. More

Global Corporate Execs Question Core Banking Team Stability Says Ernst & Young

An Ernst & Young survey has found concern among corporate customers about their banks’ ability to meet expectations on 11 of 16 key performance criteria, even though 63% of corporate executives say they are highly satisfied with the service of their core bank partners. Ernst & Young’s recently released Successful corporate banking: Focus on fundamentals finds that the lingering after-effects of the 2008 financial crisis and continuing Eurozone issues “have forced corporations to focus on the stability of their core banking teams,” says Steven Lewis, Lead Global Banking Analyst at Ernst & Young. More