In a new research survey from CIO Insight, the firm found employers that have a BYOD, or “Bring your own device,” policy see massive gains in productivity among employees, despite the inherent risks. That productivity will come at a price, however, as companies will need to start investing in mobile integration policies.

Let’s check out some of the stats from CIO Insight that show how BYOD policies are transforming the workplace for the better. For instance, the research found that 62 percent of the 500 IT and business executives that took part in the survey said that BYOD policies increased productivity. Fifty-nine percent said that it leads to more employee flexibility, and 47 percent said that such policies lead to cost savings.

Of course, companies still distribute smartphones and other devices among some employees. Fifty-eight percent of the surveyed organizations said that they will supply employees with devices, but also allow them to bring their own instead. Only eight percent of those surveyed said that they leave device acquisition entirely up to the employees.

Those who do supply employees with smartphones or other devices will have to start budgeting out those purchases now. Thirty-four percent of those surveyed said that they will have to invest in hardware bundles within the next two years. Even if your employees do bring their own device, companies will still have to budget out the hardware required to distribute information among those smartphones.

That being said, only 13 percent of survey respondents said that there’s heavy integration of mobile devices within companies. Those that have integrated mobile devices, however, are working on a number of projects to increase productivity among workers on mobile devices. Forty-nine percent of respondents are implementing virtual desktop systems so employees can work on the go, while 29 percent are building custom mobile apps to be distributed across business networks.

The point of all this is to say that mobile integration is incredibly important. A BYOD policy only helps to increase the speed in which mobile integration occurs. Not to mention, employees will be pleased to use their own Android or iOS device, instead of a business mandated BlackBerry device.

As per its support schedule, Microsoft announced that it’s dropping extended support for Windows XP in April 2014. That means that businesses and users alike have a year to upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows 8. Doing so will ensure that users continue to receive support in the form of security updates and patches from Microsoft.

Of course, Microsoft would love nothing more than to move more people to Windows 8. The new OS isn’t doing that well among consumers (except for gamers), but a forced upgrade from Windows XP may at least push some companies into buying bulk Windows 7/8 licenses.

There are some problems with that though. In April of last year, we looked at how forcing users to upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 was going to cause some headaches for businesses that rely on Windows XP and its compatibility with older software. Upgrading to a newer OS would require more than just buying a bulk license – it would require the company to rewrite core software.

As companies plan on upgrading from Windows XP, there are some companies waiting to pounce on those unsure of Windows 7 or 8. One in particular is Canonical, stewards of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. The company has been pushing Ubuntu’s enterprise capabilities for some time now, and the allure of a free OS would certainly be appealing to some.

While we certainly can’t see what the future holds, we can at least look back on a good 12 year run for Windows XP. It was arguably the most popular Windows OS ever released, and it reigned during the golden age of PCs. Those days are long gone, but we can at least look back fondly at that green hill desktop that reminded us that the grass truly was greener on the other side of the personal computing revolution.

Speaking to Reuters, RIM’s Senior Enterprise Accounts Director, Bryan Lee, said that its enterprise consumers are registering en masse for its BlackBerry 10 Ready Program. More than 1,600 customers in North America have already signed up for the service which will help with the transition to BlackBerry 10 and Enterprise Server 10.

Speaking of Enterprise Server 10, Lee said that more than 130 major government agencies and corporations are now testing the service. Some of these organizations will presumably outfit their thousands of employees with the newest BlackBerry 10 devices. That’s sure to make RIM and its investors happy.

According to Reuters, that’s already happening as RIM’s share price has more than doubled as it approaches the launch of BlackBerry 10 on January 30. The company’s share price now sits at a comfortable $14.64.

The enterprise market will definitely help RIM get back on its feet, but it’s unlikely that the company will enjoy long term success by only serving this one market. It needs to find at least some success in the consumer market as well if it intends to survive. I’m not saying that RIM needs to beat Android or iOS, but only having 7.3 percent of the smartphone market isn’t doing the company any favors.

If this whole BlackBerry 10 thing doesn’t work out for RIM, the company can at least rest easy knowing that its browser is faster than the competition’s.

Today, HP has made Nefkens’ position official. He is now HP’s executive vice president of Enterprise Services.

Nefkens joined EDS in 2001, and worked at Holland Chemical International NV for a decade before that.

“Mike has led some of our most successful account turnarounds and has already had a very positive impact on the business,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and CEO. “I’m confident in Mike’s ability to build our services business and contribute to HP’s long-term goals.”

HP certainly needs some account turnarounds at this point. The company just last month announced another huge write-down of $8.8 billion. This time, though, HP blamed most of the charge on its Autonomy subsidiary, accusing its former management of fraudulent accounting practices and misrepresenting the value of the company.

Sine that announcement, extensive finger-pointing has ensued between HP and former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch. Lynch claims Autonomy’s value has tanked due to HP mismanagement and a corporate culture of infighting. HP has said it looks forward to Lynch and other former Autonomy executives testifying under penalty of perjury.

According to the company, you can scale your traffic as your content goes viral, and it can handle it. WordPress’ network does handle 100s of millions of pageviews each day.

The offering comes with all of the built-in WordPress.com VIP features, including over 70 plugins, including integrations with Flipboard, Chartbeat, Facebook, etc.

“To top it off, you also get our new Javascript customization service that allows you the flexibility to customize your site without needing to touch the underlying PHP code. You can tweak and personalize to your heart’s content,” says Automattic’s Raanan Bar-Cohen.

Automattic has worked with Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Chef, ESPN’s Digital and Print Products, Soleil Moon Frye’s Moonfrye.com, and The Crosby Press from JackThreads for the beta.

“The GSA 7.0 helps you find information stored anywhere in your organization, whether you’re using a desktop, smartphone or tablet,” says Matthew Eichner, General Manager, Enterprise Search at Google. “Administrators can easily add content sources from secure storage, cloud services or the public web and social networking sites. GSA 7.0 also provides Google-quality search for SharePoint 2010, making for a more simple and intuitive, all-in-one search experience.”

“Users are happy when they get relevant results returned quickly,” says Eichner. “At Google, speed and relevance are the core components of a great search experience. With GSA 7.0, we’ve refined our relevance signals so that the most useful information for each particular user is always easy to find. Assisted navigation makes it easy to refine search results, and requires no manual configuration from administrators. Entity Recognition automatically identifies and suggests content you might be looking for, and GSA 7.0 also harnesses the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ allowing employees to add their own search results.”

The new GSA also comes with document preview, Google Translate, updated language capabilities, a new interface and improved scale. You can view thumbnails and flip through full-screen document previews alongside search results. Search results can be displayed in over 60 languages. According to Google, a single rack of GSAs could now fit the equivalent of the entire Google.com index in 2000 (a billion pages).

“Today’s leading companies recognize that business is social,” said CEO Marc Benioff. “With new innovations across our six product lines, companies can transform the way they sell, service, market, collaborate, work and innovate in order to connect more deeply with customers.”

For one, Saleforce unveiled the new Salesforce Touch, Chatter Communities for Partners and Data.com Social Key. Salesforce Touch expands on the company’s mobile strategy, and is powered by HTML. It lets reps collaborate on deals from their mobile devices.

Salesforce says Chatter Communities for Partners will “connect companies with distributors, resellers, suppliers and more to drive sales through seamless deal registration, access to proven sales tools and collaboration with the right experts.”

Salesforce Data.com Social Key brings together context from social networks with “traditional company data”.

Believe it or not, that was all one announcement.

The second announcement was for Chatter Communities For Service, which the company says “will turn old world of legacy portals upside down by enabling customers to tap directly into a private social community of industry peers and company experts.” It will also integrate with the Service Cloud.

Thirdly, Salesforce unveiled Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which combines social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement. It’s powered by Buddy Media and Radian6 – two recent acquisitions by the company.

Salesforce Chatterbox, the fourth announcement, is for file sharing across devices. The company says people can use it to manage and share files in the context of their business.

Salesforce Work.com is described as “the world’s first social performance management platform,” and features real-time recognition and rewards with feedback and performance reviews. The company has partnered with Amazon to “enable companies to reward and motivate their people directly from Work.com”

Finally, the company announced its next-generation Salesforce Platform with Salesforce Identity and the Salesforce Touch Platform. Salesforce says Identity will deliver “Facebook-like identity for the enterprise,” and that the new Touch Platform will allow mobile apps to be written once and deployed anywhere.

Salesforce Touch is generally available today on iPad, and is currently scheduled to be available on iPhone and Android the first half of 2013. It’s included in all Salesforce editions.

Chatter Communities for Partners is currently scheduled to be available in limited pilot this fall. It’s currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.

Data.com Social Key is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013. Pricing will be announced at general availability.

Chatter Communities for Service is scheduled to be available in limited pilot this fall, and is scheduled to be generally available the second half of next year. Pricing for that will also be announced at general availability.

Desk.com is available today, with pricing starting at $49, per full-time agent per month, for unlimited usage. Flex pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent per hour.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is generally available today, with pricing starting at $5,000 per month.

Chatterbox is currently scheduled to be available in pilot the first half of next year, with pricing announced at the time of general availability.

Work.com is scheduled to be generally available in calendar Q4 of this year, with pricing and packaging to be announced at general availability.

Salesforce Touch Platform is generally available now and included as part of Force.com. The Mobile SDK and other mobile components are available on Github .Salesforce Identity is scheduled to be generally available in 2013, with pricing to be announced.

Salesforce has a whole lot more info about all of this stuff on its blog in a series of posts.

The features are only available in preview mode right now, for Google Apps customers.

“Google Apps users now have more control over the content they post to Google+,” says Google Apps Product Management Director Clay Bavor. “When you create a post you can mark it as restricted. Restricted posts are private to your organization and can never be re-shared with anyone outside. At the same time, when you create a post, you have the flexibility to share it with specific partners or colleagues outside the organization as well if you choose.”

“When you’re on Google Apps, holding a face-to-face meeting with colleagues or clients around the world doesn’t require coordinated travel schedules or expensive video conferencing technology,” says Bavor. “All you need is a device with a camera and an internet connection. Hangouts lets up to 10 people join a video meeting from their laptop, phone or tablet.”

Bavor notes that people can join multi-way video Hangout-powered chats from Gmail, as Google recently announced, and that docs can be opened and edited. Users will also be able to add a hangout to a Calendar event, he says.

Google’s Matt Cutts said in a Google+ post that the new features “might look small, but are actually pretty huge.”

“First, with Google Apps you can now restrict posts so that it only goes to people within a company,” he said. “This lets you set up a corporate social network like Yammer, Chatter, etc. We use this feature all the time and we have a vibrant Google+ community inside of Google too.”

“The second feature lets you add a video hangout as a direct link in Google Calendar,” he added. “Google has offices all over the world, so we use this feature a ton as well. If you have a distributed company, you’ll want to try this new feature.”

During the preview period, Apps customers will be able to use the features for free through the end of 2013. In the meantime, Google says it will be adding more features and admin controls.

According to a report from ComputerWorld, Horowitz also revealed that a version of Google+ for enterprise users is on the way. He’s quoted as saying:

“We think that the enterprise-use case, everyone from multinational corporations to mum and pop businesses, is a fantastic opportunity for Google and Google+…”

“”I think there is a real market need, and we are focused on it. It is something we definitely going to do…”

The API will no doubt be a huge factor, and major announcements surrounding Google+ are expected from Google I/O – the company’s developer conference – which takes place next week.

Google has already made Google+ a central point of business’ web presence, simply by essentially replacing Google Places with Google+ Local. Google+ Pages are also integrated with Google Apps. It will be very interesting to see what more Google has in store for enterprise-level businesses.

Horowitz’s discussion at LeWeb should soon be available here.

Samsung announced today that the Galaxy S III is the first phone to get the Samsung Approved For Enterprise (SAFE) label in the United States. The move was made in response to their projections that say Android will be the number one platform for enterprise smartphones by next year. The Galaxy S III has a number of new features that should help make it the brand of choice for enterprise markets.

Samsung says that the Galaxy S III “supports a full suite of enterprise-ready features and capabilities” right out of the box. Some of those features include support for on-device AES-256 bit encryption, enhanced support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and support for Virtual Private Network and Mobile Device Management solutions.

“It’s now safe to say that the ‘Next Big Thing in Enterprise’ is here with the near-term availability of SAFE-branded Galaxy S III devices at five U.S. carriers,” said Tim Wagner, Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Sales at Samsung Mobile. “The highly desirable, SAFE-branded and QA-tested Galaxy S III smartphone systematically defragments Android to provide a consistent level of IT compliance for individuals who demand the very best in both their personal and professional lives.”

As you can see, Samsung is really going all out to capture the enterprise market. After RIM began to crash and burn, other handset manufacturers jumped at the chance to capture the lucrative enterprise market. Since Samsung is now the number one consumer Android device manufacturer, it just makes sense for them to go after the Enterprise market.

In other good news, Samsung will be starting a program called SAFE2SWITCH for those who want to trade in their old smartphones for the Galaxy S III. They’ll take handsets from both Samsung and their competitors. The deal isn’t just for Enterprise customers either as regular consumers can trade up to the Galaxy S III as well. Unfortunately, my HTC Inspire 4G is only worth $80.