Watson will be taking your calls now

IBM's supercomputer is getting a job in customer service.

FORTUNE -- It's still a sluggish job market out there, but apparently not for supercomputers. IBM's question-answering machine Watson, best known for beating lowly humans on Jeopardy!, just got a new job. According to the tech giant, Watson will now be employed in customer service centers, used as a tool for both representatives and consumers to get fast, data-driven responses.

It's been two MORE

The IPO market is back -- for enterprise tech

The hottest trend in enterprise technology is fueling the market.

FORTUNE --- If you hadn't heard of Tableau Software before its glamorous debut on the public market last Friday, you're not alone. The Seattle-based company makes visual analytics tools for technical and non-technical employees alike but is far from a household name. And yet, it raised around $254 million in its initial public offering and closed its first day of trading at MORE

Google Android's enterprise problem

Google's mobile operating system may be getting a boost from -- of all places -- Blackberry.

FORTUNE -- This week's Google I/O conference in San Francisco was disappointingly light on Android news. And it was especially light on new, enterprise-friendly features for Android devices. Instead, it showed improvements aimed at consumers and education institutions. But while Google may not seem focused on making its mobile operating system more attractive to IT departments, MORE

Intel and ARM: New leaders, same battle

Intel's new CEO starts Thursday. Chipmaker ARM's begins later this year. The only thing not changing? What they're fighting for.

FORTUNE -- Much has been made of the upcoming leadership transitions at chip rivals ARM (ARMH) and Intel (INTC). But it's unlikely that the battle plan will change for either side. Both companies chose long-time insiders to take the helm—Intel COO Brian Krzanich will become CEO later this week, and ARM's MORE

Huawei has been far from silent

Yes, Ren Zhengfei wields enormous power over the Chinese telecom giant. But the company's management is far more complex.

FORTUNE -- You may have read that Ren Zhengfei, founder and chief executive officer of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, has finally broken his media silence. The reclusive CEO gave his first public media briefing in -- of all places -- Wellington, New Zealand, where he addressed security concerns about his company and his involvement in MORE

SAP goes all in with the cloud

The German software giant is betting on cloud-based technology and services.

FORTUNE -- In case you haven't heard, SAP is serious about the cloud. On Tuesday the enterprise software giant announced it will offer HANA, its in-memory database, as a monthly subscription service, delivered via the cloud.

A limited cloud-based version of HANA was already available through Amazon (AMZN) Web Services. But SAP (SAP) says customers will now be able to access MORE

Facebook co-founder's bid to replace email

Startup Asana has attracted a lot of buzz. Now it's shooting for the big leagues.

FORTUNE -- Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz generated a lot of buzz -- and funding -- when he left the social networking giant in 2008 to take on the less glitzy world of enterprise software. High-profile investors like Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, and venture capital firms Andreessen-Horowitz and Benchmark Capital all poured money into Moskovitz's idea: Asana, MORE

Why GE is betting on software

GE is putting $105 million into Pivotal, a software firm, to boost its services margins.

FORTUNE -- Earlier this week, General Electric (GE) announced it is investing $105 million in a new platform-as-a-service provider called Pivotal, a spinoff of EMC (EMC) and VMware (VMW). Why? GE's future at least partly relies on its ability to keep churning out software and services to support the increasingly smart machines it sells. With Pivotal, MORE

One year later, SAP hasn't blown it with SuccessFactors

But the software giant has set ambitious goals. Can it reach them?

FORTUNE -- It's been over a year since German enterprise software giant SAP shelled out $3.4 billion for SuccessFactors, a Silicon Valley-based maker of human resources software. Since then, engineers on both sides of the Atlantic have been hard at work getting SuccessFactors's cloud-based apps to work alongside SAP's on-premise offerings, so that customers can more easily adopt the MORE

How Dropbox plans to conquer business

The startup's newest features are aimed at making nice with IT.

FORTUNE -- Dropbox means business. That's why the San Francisco-based file-sharing service is rebranding its "Dropbox for Teams" offering—geared at corporate users, not just consumers—to the more enterprise friendly-sounding "Dropbox for Business." In an effort to make nice with IT, the company is also introducing single sign-on capabilities, which let employees log into Dropbox with the same credentials they use MORE