Cisco Systems announced on Thursday plans to spend $31m (£15m) on a small start-up called Orative, a move meant to help Cisco extend its Unified Communications software to mobile devices.Cisco’s Unified Communications software suite, announced earlier this year, ties Cisco’s Call Manager, an Internet Protocol PBX that routes phone calls over an IP infrastructure, with a presence server, which collects status and availability data from users’ devices and feeds it to Cisco applications. It also connects the Call Manager to the …

Orange has cut its broadband pricing following flat sales figures, which analysts and industry insiders have blamed on consumer savvy and increased competition. Parent company France Telecom released its Q3 results on Thursday, which showed that Orange’s “free broadband” promotion and extensive rebranding have not had much effect on sales. Subscriber numbers went up slightly, but average revenue per user (ARPU) declined. The figures also showed that, since the promotion began at the end of May, internet connectivity revenues …

Several mobile enterprise applications from Oracle have been made available for Nokia’s popular E61 smartphone. The Finnish handset giant announced on Tuesday that it had certified applications including Oracle Mobile Field Service and Oracle’s Siebel Wireless for both the E61 device and its US-centric counterpart, the E62, which doesn’t include Wi-Fi. Mobile Field Service is designed to allow workers in the field to access work schedules and job information, while Siebel Wireless is a mobile customer relationship management …

Telecommunications giant BT has acquired Counterpane Internet Security, the threat monitoring company founded by security expert Bruce Schneier.The deal to acquire Counterpane was finalised on Tuesday and announced on Wednesday morning. Both chief technology officer Schneier and chief executive officer Paul Stich will remain in their present roles.”We are all now BT employees,” Schneier told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. “And we’ll all get paid in pounds, at par.”Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but BT indicated that it had spent …

A new fixed-mobile convergence system for establishing private mobile phone networks was unveiled on Tuesday. The system — launched by Private Mobile Networks (PMN), a wholly-owned subsidiary of enterprise telephony software company TeleWare — is the first to take advantage of the low-powered GSM spectrum auctioned by Ofcom in April of this year. Steve Haworth, TeleWare’s group director, told ZDNet UK that the network could be deployed simply using one laptop and one picocell — a small, low-powered GSM transmitter. …