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Salesforce.com made several announcements at its recent annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco about new capabilities and initiatives aimed at expanding its footprint in the strategically critical market for cloud-based computing, or platform as a service, PaaS.

VMware has introduced a software platform for mobile phones that it said will enable users to run multiple profiles on the same phone.

Affiliated Computer Services has won a five-year, $44m contract from Florida's Agency for Healthcare Administration, AHCA, to implement a third-party liability program for Florida Medicaid.

Network equipment company Nortel Networks has reported a net loss of $3.41bn for the third quarter 2008, against a profit of $27m in the year-ago quarter, on revenue down 14.3% at $2.31bn.

A NEW system at Telstra is causing call centre staff to miss their sales targets and there's concern 500 people could lose their jobs.

Computing advances to boost alien search...

SEVERAL hundred local workers are set to lose their jobs over the next three years as a result of Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of EDS.

THE federal Government has been urged to come clean over grey areas in its internet filtering plan.

THE deteriorating economic environment has had little effect on Optus, according to the company's CEO Paul O'Sullivan.

Recent outages affecting Google Apps have received a disproportionately large amount of coverage from the technology press, resulting in a misperception about the stability of this hosted collaboration and communication suite.That's the opinion of Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google's Enterprise unit, who recently chatted about this issue with IDG News Service, one of the news outlets that Google feels has blown the problem out of proportion.[ Oracle and Microsoft are just two big names moving to the cloud. Find out if you should too in "Should enterprises consider the cloud?" | Confused by cloud computing hype? Get the facts from InfoWorld's cloud computing primer. And find out more on cloud computing's risks. ]Glotzbach's view, which he outlined in a recent blog post, is that the availability and performance of Web-hosted software, like Google Apps, gets more scrutiny because its outages occur publicly in the Internet cloud. The press coverage crea