Windows 7 woos Singapore enterprise

Microsoft has unveiled a bundled suite of operating system products in Singapore specifically aimed at enterprises, reports ZDNet Asia.

Local organisations such as Integrated Health Information Systems (IHIS), Trusted Source, and Starhub said they are in the process of testing Windows 7 for compatibility with their respective IT infrastructures and applications.

Ong Leong Seng, director of IHIS' enterprise architecture development centre, said that healthcare institutions are looking to replace their Windows XP platform as the older OS comes to its end-of-life. "At the enterprise level, we made a conscious decision to skip Vista. My team and I have been actively following and doing a fair bit of testing since Windows 7 was in its beta stage."

A federated identity can be used to provide a single sign-on to multiple applications, both in the enterprise and in the cloud, reports InformationWeek.

Microsoft has adopted a 'claims-based architecture' in its approach to managing the identities of users in its Azure cloud. The Microsoft Identity Platform invokes the architecture to establish a federated identity for users.

“The claims-based architecture is said to be a more flexible approach to establishing a user's identity, than a straight-forward, on-premises Active Directory system,” says Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief identity architect.

California's state government has achieved more than $400 million in savings and cost avoidance in 2009 since the state released its five-year capital plan for IT spending, reports Government Technology.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approved a consolidation and reorganisation of the state's IT services to give the Office of the State Chief Information Officer (OCIO) and state CIO Teri Takai more control of the state's enterprise architecture.

"It provided the state CIO with authority for IT procurement policy as well as enterprise IT management, and it achieves the consolidation of multiple kinds of contracts," says Adrian Farley of OCIO. The state estimates it will save approximately $1.5 billion over the next five years because of the consolidation.