IFS AB acquired Assyst, formerly Axios Assyst, in March 2021 with the goal of enabling IT and enterprise service management, as well as IT operations management.“Think of it as managing the ERP for IT and then broadening that out into the enterprise, where you’re driving enterprise use cases for all lines of businesses, like HR, finance, facilities, and so on,” said Martin Schirmer (pictured, right), president of the Enterprise Service Management Business Unit at IFS.The platform allows businesses to automate complex processes, an essential service as organizations move toward becoming an autonomous enterprise, increasing both productivity and efficiency gains, Schirmer explained

Worldwide sales of personal computers declined 15% year-over-year in the third quarter, research firm International Data Corp. has found.IDC detailed its findings in the latest edition of its Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, a quarterly market research report. Preliminary results from the report were published today.PC makers shipped 74.25 million computers in the third quarter, down 15% from 87.31 million computers a year ago, according to IDC. The sales drop follows a similar 15.3% year-over-year decline in the previous quarter. IDC today attributed the weakening sales primarily to a combination of “cooling demand and uneven supply” in the PC market

Endor Labs, a software management platform that helps developers deal with software code dependencies, launched out of stealth mode today with $25 million in seed funding to help enterprise developers secure open-source software supply chains.Code is fundamental to security. Often when a headline comes out about an exploit or a vulnerability, it’s a problem that arose from code that was taken advantage of by a hacker or a bot that allowed them access to an internal system.Not all vulnerabilities are caused by a developer adding a bug in a new piece of code

So much for good intentions: A new feature in Apple Inc.’s iPhone 14 calls 911 when users are on rollercoaster rides.Apple debuted a feature called Crash Detection in iPhone 14 models in September, a feature that uses a dual-core accelerometer and a high dynamic-range gyroscope to detect a severe car crash and automatically call emergency services when a user is knocked unconscious. The service also uses components such as the barometer, which can detect if an airbag had deployed, and the microphone, which can determine if loud noises also accompanied the sudden change in speed such as in a crash.The last “feature” is where Apple’s good intentions fail

There is real pressure to secure data across a business’ distributed cloud infrastructures.With a new norm for remote workforces, organizations must cope with the sudden vaporization of the traditional security perimeter and rising ransomware costs. Fifty percent of those affected by ransomware also lost data, according to a recent study by the International Data Corp., based on a survey of over 500 companies. This fast-evolving threat landscape is spawning targeted solutions with aims to modernize data protection.“Druva is solving some really hard problems with a modern data protection stack,” said Dave Vellante, co-founder of theCUBE and chief research officer at Wikibon

Founded during the pandemic, Wiz Inc. offers enterprises full-stack coverage and integrated cloud security services.The company leverages the Amazon Web Services Inc. Marketplace so that businesses can easily install their solution into their infrastructure.“Our ecosystem is built around the Marketplace motion,” explained Trish Cagilostro (pictured), head of worldwide alliances at Wiz and former AWS head of business development. “Coming from AWS and now being on the other side, I see a lot of the companies that I was working with; cloud was very much this thing that’s kind of in a silo and its own box, and it competes internally

The U.S. today introduced new rules that will restrict the sale of chips and chip production equipment to China.Some of the rules will go into effect today, Protocol reported. Others will be rolled out over the coming weeks.The first set of rules announced today focuses on limiting chip exports to China. A new foreign direct product rule will block companies from supplying customers in China with chips that are used for “advanced computing and artificial intelligence applications,” Protocol reported. The rule can reportedly apply not only to products from U.S. companies but also to chips that foreign firms produce using U.S. technology

The AWS Partner Network is a global community of partners, including independent software vendors, aiming to help organizations accelerate their cloud journeys.In January 2022, AWS rolled out its new Partner Paths program to enhance the entire process for ISVs, bringing a plethora of benefits that were previously unavailable on the original APN Partnership tiers, according to Jack Andersen (pictured, left), global vice president at DataBricks Inc. “Amazon’s mental model here is that they want the world’s best ISVs to operate on AWS so that we can collaborate and co-architect on behalf of customers … to work with Amazon on these really unique use cases,” Andersen said

Is the glass half full or half empty? Well, it depends on how you want to look at it.Chief information officers are tapping the brakes on spending, that’s clear. The latest macro survey from Enterprise Technology Research quantifies what we already know to be true, that information technology spend is decelerating. CIOs and IT buyers forecast that their tech spend will grow by 5.5% this year, a meaningful deceleration from their year-end 2021 expectations. But these levels are still well above historical norms – so while the feel good factor may be in some jeopardy, overall things are pretty good – at least for now

With application programming interfaces, two separate applications can securely and efficiently communicate with each other, requiring developers to implement API gateways that enable them to maintain, build and monitor APIs regardless of scale.Five years ago, Kong Inc. developed an open-source and cloud-native API gateway that quickly became the most adopted API gateway available, able to be easily procured on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, according to Kristian Gyorkos (pictured), vice president of alliances at Kong.“We have one of the most popular open-source projects in the API gateway area,” Gyorkos said. “Even more important is just the scale at which the product’s been used

President Joe Biden today signed an executive order that directs the U.S. government to implement a data privacy agreement signed with the European Union earlier this year.Many tech companies store the information of EU users in U.S.-based data centers. Until a few years ago, the practice of moving EU users’ information to stateside data centers was governed by an agreement known as the Privacy Shield. In 2020, the EU’s top court struck down Privacy Shield over concerns about U.S. surveillance.The U.S. and the EU in March announced a new agreement, the European Union-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, that is designed to replace Privacy Shield