A new self-managing appliance packages Lotus Sametime solutions to enhance collaboration and productivity.

By Chris Smith

IBM this week announced a self-managing appliance that combines multiple communications tools into a single solution.

The "office-in-a-box" solution provides all the communications and collaboration tools that a small or mid-sized business needs in order to implement an advanced unified communications (UC) solution. For those smaller businesses with limited IT resources, the idea is to reduce complexity and give employees immediate access to people and information.

Applications and other computer services for in-house users consume plenty of resources. Virtualization enables outsourcing many of those expenses, but does it make sense for IBM i?

Written by John Ghrist

Outsourcing application and other computer services is far from an original idea for trimming IT budgets. What holds many enterprises back from taking this step are largely control issues, but it doesn't help that the many terms surrounding this kind of service remain murky. Virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud computing, application streaming, and application virtualization all seem to be overlapping terms. Adding to the confusion is that vendors offering such services refer to themselves variously as application service providers, hosted service providers, and service bureaus. Finally, there's the problem that vendors providing such services essentially break down into three main types. It can be perplexing.