John Pallatto

Oracle continued its relentless campaign of cherry-picking enterprise application software companies with a May 15 agreement to buy Agile Software, a producer of product lifecycle management products, for $495 million in cash. Oracle has acquired about 30 companies large and small over the past four years to build up its enterprise application portfolio. The acquisitions […]

Despite the companys assertions to the contrary, Googles acquisition of Internet advertising network DoubleClick for the eyebrow-raising price of $3.1 billion is bound to pose serious antitrust questions in the minds of federal regulators. The deal has Microsoft and AT&T, among others, claiming that the deal is anti-competitive. Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel […]

Major issues about how Oracle is going to help customers manage all those 28 different products and technologies it has acquired over the past four years are finally coming home to roost. Oracle has been saying that Fusion Middleware and its Fusion application strategy would allow the company to bring together the functionality of at […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Broadcasters, movie producers and media publishers of all types have access to a new search technology that can scan the Internet to discover Web sites that are illegally distributing copyrighted video and images. ACID (Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection), developed by the Virage division of Autonomy, can detect illegally posted rich media in any format […]

While SAP wants the public to believe that everything is under control, it is giving a great impression of a company in turmoil. The departure of Shai Agassi as president of SAPs Product and Technology Group is only the latest in a string a bad news that has dogged the company in recent months. The […]

It will be fascinating to learn what possible answers and defenses SAP has to offer to Oracles astounding charges that its enterprise applications archrival has engaged in wholesale theft of software and customer support documentation. The 44-page complaint that Oracle filed on March 22 in U.S District Court in San Francisco contends that Oracle meticulously […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claimed that his company is a “strong No. 2” to SAP in the ERP applications business and has the product strategy in place to outgrow its archrival. Ellison made his comments on March 20 as Oracle reported third-quarter financial results for fiscal 2007 that showed the company generated revenue of $4.4 […]

Microsoft was smart to shelve “Project Green,” its quixotic effort to horizontally integrate its enterprise resource planning suite through brute force recoding of what had been a collection of disparate accounting, financial and customer relationship applications. Microsoft realized that it would have taken far too long and been far too risky to rewrite what had […]

Microsoft customers and partners will get their first detailed look at the upcoming Dynamics Live Customer Relationship Management service during Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmers Keynote on March 14 during the Convergence 2007 conference in San Diego. Microsoft will demonstrate its hybrid approach to software as a service by showing Dynamics Live CRM running on-stage in […]

Informatica is expanding the software as a service concept from the enterprise applications sector into the data infrastructure realm with the March 8 introduction of its on-demand data integration service. Informaticas On Demand Data Replicator will enable Salesforce.com customers to replicate the corporate sales and marketing data currently hosted on the Salesforce.com servers and move […]

Oracles $3.3 billion acquisition of Hyperion Solutions, a specialist in the field of corporate performance management, has set the fox among the chickens in the broader business intelligence market. This has long been a relatively quiet and sometimes prosperous sector of the enterprise software market, where the corporate acquisitions have been far less costly and […]

Google gained a major new ally in its campaign to extend its applications and information services deeper into the enterprise with IBMs Feb. 28 announcement that it has integrated Google Gadgets with its WebSphere Portal. Customers who use WebSphere Portal to build corporate Web sites will have access to more than 4,000 Google Gadgets, which […]