The collaboration between global technology giants EMC, Cisco and VMware promises to reduce the cost of virtualisation for businesses of all sizes, EMC says.

The companies have come together to share their technology with one another and create a product that simplifies virtualisation technology for the consumer.

Disaster recovery and risk management are key governance aspects businesses need to take seriously in order to stay on top of IT infrastructure, EMC Australia and New Zealand global services director Gary Cox says.

Mr Cox said risk management was critical to the operational health of a company, and to a company’s brand and its general customer service.

Microsoft fell harder than analysts were expecting during the June quarter, with profit plummeting 29% and revenue down 17%.

The company's shares (NAS: MSFT) tumbled up to 8% in after-hours trading.

IBM is bidding to buy Sun Microsystems for at least $US6.5 billion - a 100% premium on the market - according to a Wall Street Journal newsflash.

If it goes through, the acquisition would be the biggest in IBM’s history, beating its deal to buy business intelligence software maker Cognos for $US5 billion in November 2007 [UPDATE: Sun shares are up more than 80% today; read The Sun also rises].

As rumoured, US networking giant Cisco has announced its entry into the server market with a “Unified Computing System" that pits it against former partners.

Cisco's new product is a full-service data centre product, incorporating Cisco’s first hardware server, plus virtualisation, networking, management and storage components - the latter in partnership with EMC spin-off VMWare. Microsoft, SAP, RedHat, BMC Software, Novell, Oracle and NetApp are among a raft of other partners who have signed on to the Unified Computing initiative.