Dennis Callaghan

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday made available the long-awaited beta of its Greenwich real-time communication server along with a strategy designed to make Greenwich an emerging standard for embedding instant messaging and presence detection in other applications. Greenwich is being positioned as a counterweight to Lotus Softwares Sametime IM and presence server, the acknowledged leader in […]

Firstwave Technologies Inc. and Surebridge Inc. on Tuesday became the latest technology companies to announce acquisitions in a week that has already been heavy in consolidation in the software and services space. In a cash-stock deal, Firstwave, a CRM software developer, scooped up Connect-Care Inc., a company that develops CRM software specifically for other software […]

On paper, Divine Inc.s plan made all the sense in the world. Buy young or failing e-business software and services companies on the cheap and mold their products together into integrated suites of content management, collaboration and CRM applications with associated services under the “extended enterprise” moniker. But after nearly two years in which it […]

SPSS Inc. this week will roll out its PredictiveMarketing analytic application, making a technology originally developed as an add-on to Siebel Systems Inc.s CRM applications available as a stand-alone product. A longtime provider of data mining and statistical analysis software, SPSS is continuing its efforts to reach less-technical business users with this release. The Chicago-based […]

Applix Inc., a software company that recently realigned its business around business performance management solutions, revealed Friday that it had to get its own financial house in order. And it will do so under new leadership The Westboro, Mass., company announced that it intends to restate certain of its historical financial statements, regarding two separate […]

Salesforce.com is close to making new hosted back-office application services available and has reached profitability. The hosted customer relationship management software provider has long planned to offer hosted back-office applications. Salesforce.com Billing Edition is the first phase of that strategy, featuring hosted applications for billing and invoicing, electronic bill presentation, contract management, order management and […]

Recommind Inc. will announce Friday version 2.1 of its search and knowledge management tool, MindServer. The software is used for information categorization and retrieval. MindServer categorizes unstructured data contained in documents such as presentations, e-mails, Web pages, news feeds and contracts by automatically identifying concepts that describe a document, regardless of the language or subject, […]

Just one week after announcing that it was exploring strategic options that included bankruptcy, Divine Inc. formally declared bankruptcy Tuesday. The e-business software company, formed from the acquisition of more than a dozen software and services companies, filed a voluntary petition to reorganize under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. Company officials said the […]

Open Text Corp. continued its recent acquisition spree Wednesday, with the acquisition of portal vendor Corechange Inc. for $4.2 million in cash. The move demonstrated continuing consolidation in the content management, portal and collaboration software spaces and was Open Texts third acquisition in the past four months. Waterloo, Ontario-based Open Text completed the acquisition of […]

David Gurle, Microsoft Corp.s product unit manager for the companys forthcoming Greenwich real-time communications platform, said Tuesday that instant messaging needs to move beyond, well, instant messaging and become a more ubiquitous enterprise application. Speaking at the Instant Messaging Planet Spring 2003 Conference and Expo in Boston, Gurle compared instant messaging to a teenager going […]

As Microsoft Corp. readies new reporting capabilities for its SQL Server business intelligence platform, Cognos Inc., one of the reporting software vendors threatened by the move, is developing the next version of its Series 7 BI platform. Microsoft earlier this month said it is developing new software called Reporting Services. Officials at the Redmond, Wash., […]

IBMs Lotus Software has patched a number of flaws in its Lotus Domino 6 Web server that had made the server susceptible to remotely exploitable buffer overruns. The problems, first identified in mid-January, were reported earlier this week by Next Generation Security Software Ltd., a Surrey, England-based security software firm. Patches to fix the problems […]