The highly anticipated Facebook IPO will have ramifications for businesses and how they operate. Just as the Google IPO in 2004 changed the search engine business, catapulting search engines into a major marketing driver and changing how companies spend for advertising and evaluate its effectiveness, Facebook’s IPO will confirm the arrival of social networking as a force in business.

Even before the Facebook IPO companies began capitalizing on social business. wiredFINANCE covered it here. Of related interest, David Armano explores Six Social Business Trends here.

But the initial kick came last year with a Booz and Company study here. In that study Booz reports that one-third of companies already had a senior executive who is responsible for social media company-wide. Among companies that consider themselves best-in-class the figure jumped to 41%. What will the mega Facebook IPO do? more

An Oracle announcement in March about dropping support for a particular Intel chip (Itanium) triggered a clash among two IT giants. While it may make for fun viewing from the sidelines, Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) thousands of customers using the Oracle database have reasons to be concerned.

Many thousands of HP customers run Oracle software on Itanium-based servers. These customers rightfully are nervous, fearing the loss of support from Oracle for their critical database servers. As wiredFINANCE wrote previously, moving to a different server is not trivial. HP has tried to calm nerves with a recent FAQ here.

No matter how either of the vendors tries to soothe nerves, many companies will opt for technology migration. Eager to exploit a competitive opportunity, IBM is jumping in with migration deals. In truth, companies have options. more

In case you missed it, there is a digital transformation of the economy underway. wiredFINANCE referenced the coming digital transformation earlier this year. But you can see it all around you with the proliferation of digital capabilities in just about everything you do—in your new car, in appliances you buy, in the instrumenting of business processes of all types.

Behind this digital transformation is the Internet, which is the medium across and through all these digital bits travel. Ultimately every item, everything with an RFID tag, every smartphone, anything needing Internet access will need an IP address. But, as the Internet currently is configured, it is running out of IP addresses. That’s the problem Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses.

A survey of U.S. technology and business decision makers by IT industry association CompTIA found 31% of respondents believe the transition to IPv6 will be mostly smooth. wiredFINANCE agrees mainly because for a while at least, the big Internet providers will use masking and address translation techniques to cover up the issue. But at some point, companies will have to incorporate IPv6 when they upgrade their communications equipment. more

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