Sumner Lemon

As the IT industry changes to keep pace with convergence and the rise of emerging markets, vendors like Hewlett-Packard Co. have to stay one step ahead of the curve to remain competitive. At HP, the job of directing that effort falls to Shane Robison, the company's executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer. Robison caught up by telephone with IDG News Service during a recent stopover in Hong Kong to discuss how different trends, such as convergence and the rising importance of China and India, have affected HP's R&D strategy. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Microsoft Corp. will step up its investments in Asia over the next two years as part of a bid to strengthen its relationship with partners and corporate customers in the area of mission-critical technologies.

Singapore's Wireless@SG free Wi-Fi service entered operation Friday, one month ahead of schedule, the Infocomm Development of Authority of Singapore said, adding that availability of the service will be extended to three years instead of two.

Adoption of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system will happen at a faster pace than any previous operating system release, a software analyst predicted.

After several quarters of lackluster financial performance in Asia, EMC Corp. executives are looking to get the company's operations back on track, focusing on what the company's president for Asia Pacific operations called an execution challenge.

A comparison of vulnerabilities in Microsoft's SQL Server database and Oracle Corp.'s relational database management (RDBM) products by U.K.-based Next Generation Security Software (NGSS) shows Oracle's products to have far more vulnerabilities than do products from Microsoft.

Citibank Singapore is offering a new way for credit-card holders to make payments -- using their fingerprints instead of credit cards.

William Amelio, the president and chief executive officer of Lenovo Group Ltd., is losing patience with efforts to revamp the company's supply chain -- a critical part of the company's ongoing restructuring drive.