Apple has given the iPhone the ability to log in securely to enterprise networks, boosting its credentials as a business device. The latest software also supports new third party applications including VoIP.

Security research and consulting firm Matasano has entered the security appliance game with a new product called Playbook, designed to take some of the pain out of managing large numbers of firewalls from different vendors.

MessageLabs, best known as a provider of email security services, last week introduced a managed email backup service that has as a selling point the same security features built into the company's other products.

Netgear joined a select band of network equipment makers after announcing the release of an open source wireless router, designed to be highly customisable.

Qumranet, the commercial sponsor of the KVM virtualisation software, has begun beta-testing a desktop virtualisation system aimed at geographically distributed organisations.

Network management software company SolarWinds on Tuesday updated its flagship Orion software, with a focus on making it easier to monitor large or geographically distributed networks.

Sipera Systems, a security firm focusing on unified communications (UC), has announced a new edition of the Sipera IPCS range of security appliances adding functions for more advanced corporate IP telephony networks.

WildPackets this week introduced a highly extensible data recorder for 10 Gigabit (10Gig) Ethernet networks, the latest sign that 10Gig networks are gaining wider acceptance, even among medium-sized businesses.

Femtocells may be stymied by handsets that can't make best use of them, even though an industry agreement has been signed which should make the indoor base stations a fundamental part of future wireless networks including WiMax and LTE.

10Gig Ethernet specialist Force10 Networks has claimed that its switch/routers are now integral to more than a dozen of the world's top 40 supercomputers. They include the US Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roadrunner, which currently ranks as the world's most powerful supercomputer and was the first to reach a peak performance of 1 Petaflop.

The Ruby programming language, which has become popular as the basis for web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, contains serious security flaws that could allow attackers to take over an organisation's web server, according to the Ruby development team.

Dutch broadband start-up Worldmax on Tuesday demonstrated what it said is Europe's first mobile WiMax network, built by Alcatel-Lucent over the past five months and set to go fully online at the end of this summer.

Operators and vendors have agreed a standard which could speed up the arrival of femtocells - the indoor base stations which are designed to improve coverage of 3G networks indoors by piggy-backing on home and office broadband.

Power-over-Ethernet specialist PowerDsine has launched a pre-standard range of high-power 'midspans' - boxes which sit in front of a non-PoE switch and add up to 32W to the cable for powering devices at the far end.

Akamai and Citrix are linking up to offer global application optimisation, combining Akamai's Internet-based web application acceleration (WAA) service with Citrix NetScaler application optimisation gear in customer sites.

Silver Peak has launched what it claimed is the biggest WAN accelerator ever - a box able to optimise, de-duplicate, compress and encrypt 1Gbit/s of WAN traffic.

Aerohive, the enterprise Wi-Fi company that sells access points that co-operate without the use of a central switch, has started European operations, and announced its first customer here.

Network activity analysis specialist eTelemetry has added the ability to detect rogue access points to its Locate appliance, which can link devices and people to their IP and MAC addresses.

Software developer Ipswitch hopes to win large enterprise users over to its network monitoring tool WhatsUp Gold, the company said this week, as it launched version 12 of the software and announced a drive into the network analysis and troubleshooting market.

Brocade has reaffirmed its commitment to Fibre Channel with a range of 8Gbit/s switches and server host bus adapters (HBAs).

The UK government has published the agreement between it and fellow European governments, and the United States of America, over the promotion, provision and use of the Galileo and Global Positioning System (GPS) systems.

3Com has claimed it leads the market in making its networking gear more energy efficient. The company based its claim on a report by US analyst firm In-Stat; however, a rival has charged that 3Com only counted its role in enterprise-class large switches and may actually lag behind in greening the key market for small and mid-sized Ethernet switches.

Riverbed has done deals with several developers of network monitoring software to get them to add support for its Steelhead WAN appliances.

Web gateway developer Blue Coat and content security specialist Vericept have adopted a standard called ICAP to enable their devices to collaborate.

10G Ethernet provides big performance gains for virtualised systems, as long as the network adapter can offload the "heavy lifting" from the host server, said Chelsio Communications as it announced that the latest release 4.1 of Citrix XenServer now includes drivers for its Unified Wire 10G NICs as standard.