John Pallatto

A new technology built into Windows Vista that automatically saves unstored documents when IT managers run patch installations will be a boon to PC users who never turn off their PCs, industry analysts said Thursday. The technology, which Microsoft has code-named Freeze Dry, is designed to save data and application states when IT runs patching […]

Salesforce.com Wednesday reported profits of $5 million on total revenue of $71.9 million for its fiscal second quarter, as it continued to show strong growth in the number of customers and total subscribers that it is signing on. The provider of on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) software picked up 41,000 new subscribers to reach a […]

SAN FRANCISCO—While it remains one of the top providers of proprietary database and applications software in the world, Oracle this week made several moves to demonstrate that it is a major player in the Linux and open-source market. The company announced at LinuxWorld here that it was releasing OCFS 2 (the Oracle Cluster File System […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here this week has drawn fewer people who came to learn what Linux is all about and more who are ready to buy Linux products that can deliver cost saving, performance and reliability. That was the view expressed by several LinuxWorld attendees who took time out to talk about […]

IBM plans to release as open-source a sophisticated new search and text analysis technology that is able to find relationships, trends and facts buried in a wide range of unstructured data, including e-mails, Web pages, text documents, images, audio and video. Called the UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture), the technology is able is able to […]

SugarCRM Inc. has shipped Version 3.5 of its open-source customer relationship management package and is offering a $449 enterprise edition that supports the Oracle 9i and MySQL relational databases. The Sugar Enterprise Edition also provides an offline client, advanced reporting tools and a module loader designed to provide plug-and-play installation for third-party application extensions, said […]

Seeking to expand its lineup of business team collaboration products, WebEx on Monday announced that it was acquiring privately owned Intranets.com for $45 million in cash. WebEx Communications Inc. officials said it would use a portion of its $220 million in cash reserves to pay for the buyout of Intranets.com, which is based in Burlington, […]

A research report by Summit Strategies achieved a new high in market-analysis hyperbole in July when it suggested that Salesforce.com has an opportunity to become the “Microsoft of the on-demand software world.” The theory, propounded by Summit analyst Tom Kucharvy, holds that Salesforce.com is becoming a de facto operating environment for on-demand software applications. The […]

Two organizations are joining forces to offer a service that enables Internet users to establish identities and reputations, allowing others to decide whether they are the kind of people they want to get to know or do business with. Opinity Inc., a San Jose, Calif. company that started an online personal reputation service, and Identity […]

My recent column “Oracle Multicore Licensing Ignores Market Reality” struck a chord with a couple of our readers, who say they feel that Oracle isnt being clear and reasonable about its fee and license policies. In my column, I take the position that Oracle is going against a strong prevailing current by sticking with its […]

Plaxo on Tuesday announced the start of a public beta test program for a version of its online contact management service for the Mozilla Foundations Thunderbird e-mail client. The Plaxo Inc. online service automatically updates e-mail address books as contacts update their own contact information, such as e-mail and home addresses or home, work and […]

Microsoft Corp. has enlisted the help of a customer incentive service to provide gifts and airline mileage as rewards to customers who use its Live Meeting Web conferencing system. Microsoft is working with Incentive Logic Inc., a rewards software and services company based in Scottsdale, Ariz., that provides what it calls its “e-loyalty platform,” rewarding […]