IBM has pledged $1 billion in financing to help SMBs procure certain IBM offerings, such as cloud services, big data and analytic systems. The financing will be available over the next 18 months and can be approved within 60 seconds, the company says. Customers will typically repay the loans over 36 months with interest rates as low as 0 percent for 12 months, with no money down. READ MORE
There are a lot of things that IBM doesn’t do or make: smartphones, tablets, and, yes, PCs. But Big Blue has made it clear that it intends to carve out a space in the mobile arena: in January, the company named Kevin Cavanaugh vice president for business and technical strategy for IBM collaboration and moved to develop cross-platform support for Apple’s iOS, RIM’s BlackBerry and Google’s Android. What about Microsoft? Cricket. READ MORE
