HP enhances Agile Accelerator

HP has introduced enhancements to the HP Agile Accelerator to help customers in their application modernisation initiatives so they can respond to changing business scenarios quickly and cost-effectively, reports eChannelLine.

"Moving software forward to add business capability is the hardest thing to get done," says Mark Sarbiewski, senior director of products, HP Software & Solutions. "Automating business processes has become a software problem. How do we make software more responsive to address the needs of business?"

Application modernisation is the key, states Sarbiewski. "It means technology change from proprietary to open, architecture from siloed to modular, teams moving from local to shared, process changing from lengthy to agile, and the platform changing from on-premise to cloud."

The upcoming Office for Mac 2011 will include many of the features present in Office 2010, says Microsoft, and will be rolled out to consumers and businesses at an undefined point later this year, states eWeek.

As with Microsoft Office 2010, Office 2011 will allow Mac users to access their documents online through Microsoft Office Web Apps.

Considering Microsoft's entrant into the growing world of cloud-based productivity applications, and a competitor to offerings such as Google Apps, Web Apps features stripped-down versions of OneNote, PowerPoint, Excel and Word.

2009 saw the likes of Microsoft and Research In Motion unveil their own mobile marketplaces, in hopes of capitalising on the success of Apple's App Store. This has been estimated to have netted the apps emporium $440 million a year since it opened in July 2008, writes ZDNet.

Eyeing Apple's hold on the market, Nokia acknowledged late last year that it had a thing or two to learn from the Cupertino company in that respect, and would put more focus on its Ovi store. Samsung, too, announced it would release a marketplace built on top of its new platform, Bada.

Some analysts have been optimistic about the growth of mobile marketplaces. In a series of reports, Ovum said the surge in the number of mobile apps downloaded would slow from 153% each year between 2008 and 2011, to 33% by the end of 2014. Nonetheless, it would hit 18.7 billion apps downloaded, including free and paid-for apps, by 2014, worth an estimated $6 billion.