As the web evolves into a more collaborative platform, the technologies and business models involved in that transition are being swept up into the “Web 2.0” rubric, a term vague enough to encompass almost anything one cares to push under its banner, but catchy in summing up the widespread sense that the internet is at a tipping point.
For users of business applications, it’s the annual maintenance fees that make the software really expensive. With that in mind, a handful of third-party support services firms are trying to lure IT managers with the following proposition: turn your maintenance work over to us and watch your bills shrink by as much as 50%.
By Stacy Cowley
SAP has made its long-awaited dive into the hosted, subscription customer relationship management on demand market, launching a new software service with a starting monthly price tag of $US75 per user. But SAP won't be going head-to-head with on-demand trailblazers such as Salesforce.com: Its system carries a 100-user minimum, restricting its potential customers to the enterprise clients SAP traditionally targets.
CA has acquired Control-F1, an IT-support automation software maker based in Calgary, Alberta. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
A group of top software vendors recently gathered to unveil a new specification they hope will simplify application development within SOA (services-oriented architecture) environments.
SAP AG and Microsoft Corp. are about to release to 40 early-adopter customers the first version of their jointly developed integration product, code-named Mendocino.
BEA Systems has acquired Java tools maker SolarMetric, a small, private company based in Austin, Texas. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Oracle's erstwhile chief financial officer, Greg Maffei, will soon take on the chief executive officer (CEO) job at investment company Liberty Media The appointment, announced Wednesday, removes some of the mystery around Maffei's hurried departure from Oracle after working there for just four months.
Oracle has lost its chief financial officer for the second time this year. The company announced last week that Greg Maffei will leave later this month, to be replaced by Oracle co-president Safra Catz.
IBM has released Workplace Designer 2.5, a development tool it hopes will help users bridge the gap between its legacy Lotus Notes/Domino architecture and the Workplace platform IBM has declared is the future when it comes to collaboration applications.
Biometric security systems have one particularly critical vulnerability: how do you replace your finger if a hacker figures out how to duplicate it? An IBM research team working on that problem says it’s recently cracked a major problem in the area of “cancellable biometrics.”
Bowing to market realities, Microsoft said it will begin working with an ideological foe, open-source development and services company JBoss, on optimizing interoperability between JBoss' middleware and Microsoft's Windows Server software.
Sun Microsystems has recently open-sourced the code for its implementation of JavaServer Faces (JSF), its framework for building user interfaces to Java-based Web applications.
Carly Fiorina has reached a deal to pen a memoir about her dramatic career, which was put on hold in February following her departure from Hewlett-Packard after a turbulent five-year run as the company's chief executive.