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iPhones are becoming a standard in the enterprise. And with the the iPhones, we are seeing a number of applications for a variety of different uses.

The latest is an application for security managers made by Cisco. The application alerts managers to threats in the enterprise so they may respond in real-tme to incidents that merit attention. It's now available in the iTunes store.

Hewlett-Packard will acquire 3Com for $2.7 billion to compete more effectively against Cisco Systems in the competitive computer networking market.

The deal, announced this afternoon, appears on the surface to help HP gain a position in China. This is where the action is in the computer networking market and a main reason for the acquisition. But below the surface is a story about 3Com's falling position in the Chinese market and the rise of Huawei Technologies, a player that everyone is watching, including Cisco, which considers the Chinese company its biggest rival.

The news from Palo Alto Networks reinforces what we should probably expect will be the norm for the foreseeable future. According to the company's Application Usage and Risk Report, social technologies and collaborative applications are moving deep into the enterprise with Twitter seeing a 250 percent increase in use since Spring of last year.

In face of a report like this, it makes sense that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would be a fit for companies. Employees understand how social technologies function. Collaborative applications make sense for getting the work done.

Salesforce.com and Cisco announced a partnership today that brings together Salesforce.com's online customer service software with Cisco's strengths in IP Telephony. The service, called "Customer Interaction Cloud," is designed to provide a complete, cloud-based customer service offering for small to medium sized businesses.

Doug Dennerline spent ten years at Cisco and was most recently Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Software Group, making him the man in charge of WebEx and other popular offerings. He was also the one spearheading a rumored move by Cisco to make an online competitor to Microsoft Office and other Web-based collaboration suites.

But today Dennerline is departing the company for CRM- and platform-as-a-service company Salesforce, where he's becoming its head of enterprise sales in the Americas. Before heading up the SaaS wing at Cisco, he was a senior VP at the commercial and enterprise sales groups.

In its midyear global security report for 2009, Cisco says there's plenty to be worried about when it comes to the way that online crime operations are operating.

Bot herders and other nefarious characters are still using cutting-edge computing and social engineering. But according to Cisco's analysis, the real innovation is how those behind some of the biggest threats are collaborating in new ways. It's enterprise 2.0 for the criminal underbelly of the Internet.

Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell "choice" for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But, it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.

One doesn't tend to associate Cisco with Web 2.0, social media or cloud computing. Cisco equals routers, the plumbing of the web. In other words, vital and hugely profitable; but not the 'new, new thing' of the Internet. It turns out we have written before about how Cisco is using social media to reach enterprise clients and playing in the enterprise social networking space. Now Cisco wants to position its Application Extension Platform (AXP) in the cloud platform space and is encouraging developers with $100,000 in prizes for the most innovative applications.

While today's Apple Keynote was slightly underwhelming, a lot of other companies have made up for this by releasing their own products during MacWorld. One of the more exciting applications that launched today was WebEx's new native iPhone application (iTunes link). Thanks to this, you can now join meetings hosted on Cisco's popular WebEx service directly from your iPhone.

Cisco announced today the acquisition of Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. It's important to note that Cisco has acquired the company called Jabber (jabber.com), not the open standard Jabber (jabber.org) which we have written about extensively in the past. The Jabber protocol, now called XMPP, is an open standard for Instant Messaging. The Jabber company builds products on, and provides support for, the protocol. In many ways Jabber.com is similar to what Red Hat is in the Linux community. See Marshall Kirkpatrick's description of Jabber the standard below.