John Pallatto

Sun Microsystems Inc.s long struggle to return to profitability hasnt shaken the loyalty of Solaris system integrators to the companys computer architecture—or to its future. “I have great faith in the Sun software architecture,” said Victor Schrader, president of Schrader & Associates LLC, a systems integrator and developer of secure messaging systems and client/server applications […]

NEW YORK—With the latest release of its hosted software suite, Saleforce.com Inc. aims to put the custom into customer relationship management. The company on Monday introduced new development tools and features that it says make its hosted CRM software highly customizable without the need for high-level programming skills. The spring 04 release of Salesforce.coms CRM […]

Keynote Systems Inc. on Tuesday disclosed that it has acquired privately held NetRaker Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., to fill out its product line with more measurement and analysis tools for customer-experience management. Keynote officials declined to disclose the terms of the NetRaker acquisition. NetRaker specializes in tools that measure and analyze customers browsing and […]

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will file a motion Monday to block an antitrust lawsuit filed by VeriSign Inc., contending that it violates a California law barring suits aimed at chilling public debate and free speech. The “anti-SLAPP” law, enacted in 1992 by the California Legislature, seeks to thwart “strategic lawsuits […]

Its curious why it took so long for Yahoo Inc. to discover that it was nurturing an adversary during all of the years that it hosted Google Inc.s search engine. Long before Yahoo finally switched search engines in February, Google was adding features to its own site designed to challenge Yahoos position as a popular […]

SAN FRANCISCO—IBM is barreling forward with its research on advanced technology to make speech applications and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems more powerful than ever, said Gary Cohen, general manager of IBMs Pervasive Computing group. Customers are already productively using IBMs speech technology, and “we want to extend our 30-year history of investing in research […]

For years people who have struggled to work with mindless interactive voice response (IVR) systems have wondered when computers might become smart enough to react like conversational human beings. The answer is not very soon and possibly never unless computer scientists can invent a machine with something resembling conscious intelligence. But that still leaves plenty […]

The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Friday announced it has received proposals for 10 new sponsored top-level domains (sTLDs). The new categories include support for mobility, regions and adult-entertainment. The 10 new domains include: .asia (serving the Pan-Asia and Asia Pacific communities), .cat (promoting the Catalan linguistic and cultural community), .jobs […]

SAN FRANCISCO—The high-tech community in general and Silicon Valley in particular have been “pathetic” when it comes to fighting the prevailing “extremist” political view in Washington that open-source software is a threat to strong intellectual property rights, according to Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig. These extremists have created an intellectual property “McCarthyism” that projects […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Open-source software developers are subject to the same macroeconomic forces as the rest of the IT industry, and they have to avoid repeating the monstrously costly mistakes of the 1990s, says Ray Lane, general partner in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. In the present environment of unpredictable threats of international terrorism […]

Joe Davis, former head of PeopleSofts Customer Relationship Management division, has joined Coremetrics Inc. as president and chief executive officer. Davis said Wednesday that he left PeopleSoft at the end of February after working two years as group vice president and general manager in charge of marketing and development of PeopleSofts CRM applications. However, Davis […]

With the third edition of its online application server, released Tuesday, Microsoft has substantially strengthened the business-to-business, e-business and data integration features of BizTalk Server 2004. But the package still has a long way to go before it has the broad enterprise-scale features of its key competitors, IBMs WebSphere and BEA Systems WebLogic. The key […]