IBM has acquired Guardium, a real-time provider of enterprise monitoring technology to secure and provide better business intelligence across the hundreds of databases that often exist in larger enterprises.

Guardium has established itself as one of the premiere data security companies. Its clients are a who's who of the Global 100. Its technology is designed to protect from internal and external threats to the enterprise. It is known for its ability to provide data integrity for better governance and compliance.

Collaboration may be the hottest trend to hit the enterprise this year. But what makes it so hot? Why now?

According to "Benchmarking Your Collaboration Strategy,"
a new report from Forrester Research, two key trends make collaboration important to the enterprise right now:

The amount of content that people produce is morphing, especially as the advent of social computing becomes more commonplace.

It is not often that something as deeply geeky as XBRL gets onto the front page of Wired magazine. Daniel Roth's superb article about radical transparency raised the profile of those four letters. What could be more boring than an XML standard for accountants that has been around for a decade? On the other hand, what could be more exciting than something that might disrupt and recreate the deeply broken global financial system? I spent two days at the XBRL US National Conference in New York to find out the reality, which is somewhere in between.

Volvo IT has a policy against using its network to post racist and other defamatory information against individuals. But it is considerably less visible and not nearly as thorough as other corporate policies for posting information to the Internet, on blogs and social networks.

The Volvo IT policy is an Adobe PDF file that details pretty clearly what is deemed inappropriate.

Games can be a clever way to gain knowledge about a market and provide a simulated way for people to play with the products you sell.

"IT Manager III: Unseen Forces" does just that. It's an online game developed by Intel that touches on the aspirations of any IT manager to become the CTO of a global enterprise.

Happy Tweetsgiving!

At any number of companies, people are being asked to do their part. To give something back to their community.

Epic Change is taking a different approach. Through tomorrow, the Tweetsgiving campaign asks people to share whatever they are thankful for on Twitter, your blog, flickr, Facebook, YouTube or blip.fm

One of the risks facing any enterprise is how to deal with people who use the corporate network to post rude, sexist or even racist material on public facing web sites.

That issue is coming home to roost for Volvo, following the news that Wikipedia has banned editing from machines inside the Volvo IT Department for racist remarks left on the pages of two well-known Pakistani Cricket players.

When you look at Enterprise 2.0, you can see the hype pretty clearly but what is not so evident is how social computing efforts are faring within corporations and large organizations.

That's what's striking about the report from the 2.0 Adoption Council. The group did a web survey of its 100 members with 77 responding. That may seem like a small number to use for any quantifiable conclusion about the state of Enterprise 2.0. But the people who responded lead or help lead Enterprise 2.0 efforts at some of the largest organizations in the world. Thirty-four percent of the respondents work for companies with more than 10,000 employees. Twenty-five percent work for organizations that have more than 100,000 employees.

Google Apps is making it a bit more enticing for companies of all sizes to adopt its service for the Blackberry smart phone.

In a post this morning on the Google Enterprise blog, the group announced Google Apps Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server has doubled the number of Blackberry phones it can support. This effectively allows larger enterprises to place more users on fewer servers.

As we approach 2010, a number of new efforts are underway to make documents more social. One consultant told us how recently a client tried to turn Sharepoint into a Twitter client. That's a monster!

But we have to give SAP credit for developing a more innovative way to add social elements to PowerPoint presentations.