John Pallatto

Salesforce.com has hit a couple of speed bumps in its drive to prove that an on-demand software company can be just as successful and—more importantly—just as effective as companies selling software thats installed on premises. The company has confirmed two services outages, one lasting nearly 6 hours on Dec. 20 that affected most of its […]

Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., perennial allies in the competition against IBM and Microsoft Corp., reaffirmed Tuesday that they will continue to work together in the development of Java applications and in marketing Oracle software. Sun CEO Scott McNealy started Tuesdays “town meeting” session for media and employees at Oracle headquarters by dispelling rumors […]

Salesforce.com confirmed that it experienced a “minor interruption” Thursday of its hosted customer relationship management application service in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. However, the interruption occurred “in the middle of the night there, and we are not aware of customer issues,” resulting from the outage, Bruce Francis, the companys vice president of […]

At first glance it would seem to be out of character for Microsoft to spend many billions of dollars to buy out a company like Yahoo rather than continue with its dogged strategy of building up its MSN search portal to challenge the dominance of Google. But that doesnt mean that it wont happen, and […]

People love labels, especially marketers. Labels help people wrap ideas, products and markets into neat packages that are easier to understand. Things that are easier to understand are also easier to sell. But labels can also be arbitrary and artificial, which render them useless for helping people understand what a specific technology or a product […]

Salesforce.coms daylong outage Tuesday was caused by “an extremely rare, undocumented bug” that neither the company nor its database vendor had ever seen before, a company executive said Thursday. There was no indication that the outage was caused by a lack of capacity or scalability in Salesforce.coms IT architecture, said Bruce Francis, the companys vice […]

Salesforce.coms on-demand customer relationship management service recovered Wednesday from a system outage that prevented users from accessing the system during business hours. “Users experienced intermittent access” Tuesday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:41 p.m. eastern time and between 2:00 p.m. and 4:45 p.m. eastern time because of a database cluster error in one of the companys […]

Nothing can be more satisfying for a software company than to use its technology to uncover a serious business problem that needs a solution, especially when it gives you a chance to discredit an arch-competitor. That is the situation Microsoft took advantage of when it disclosed this week that its HoneyMonkey exploit detection technology showed […]

Rearden Commerce Inc., a startup developer of an on-demand business services platform, has formed an alliance with WorldTravel BTI of WorldTravel Partners LLC, one of the top travel management companies, to help it sell its services platform to large enterprise customers. Rearden, based in San Mateo, Calif., has developed a Web-based application designed to give […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The software industry is steadily maturing and will soon start to act closer to its age by using debt to fund future expansion and development, rather than equity, which has long been the standard industry practice. This is the view of David Roux, co-founder and managing director of corporate investment firm Silver Lake Partners […]

Editors Note: This story is part of Innovations 2006, a continuing series of stories from the reporters and editors of Ziff Davis Internet. Instead of the usual mile-high look at the year ahead, these articles examine particular technologies and markets in transition, including whats in store for them. Software as a service has won such […]

New workflow, reporting and customizable dashboards are among the new features that SugarCRM Inc. is adding to the version 4.0 of its open-source Sugar Suite customer relationship management product due for release on Dec. 16. The new version will include a business rules-based workflow management system designed to ensure the sales personnel and sales managers […]