Renee Boucher Ferguson

NEW YORK — Jeff Raikes, group vice president of the Business and Productivity Systems group at Microsoft Corp., sees worker productivity doubling over the next decade, with the help of Microsoft technology. Raikes will outline Microsofts forthcoming information worker productivity innovations – and announce a handful of new tools – in his keynote address later […]

E-marketplace Covisint LLC is looking to help lower the cost of office supplies for car dealers. Unlike its efforts to automate the purchasing of car parts, this new initiative goes back to the roots of business-to-business e-commerce by facilitating the purchase of office supplies and similar commodities. Covisint and The Reynolds Co., a major forms […]

Hoping to increase the ability of companies to quickly and inexpensively integrate small numbers of trading partners, Microsoft Corp. last week shipped Partner and Standard editions of its BizTalk Server 2002. The new editions enable small businesses to take part in business-to-business e-commerce by providing lower-priced software that lets them integrate their internal ordering and […]

The Office of Homeland Security is moving forward with plans to integrate disparate data systems across at least 22 federal organizations to improve communication and information sharing. The office has crafted two high-priority integration programs that are ready to go into pilot phase as early as next month. In addition, the office is working with […]

General Electric Global Exchange Services (GXS) announced today that it is being acquired by Francisco Partners, a technology buyout fund. Francisco Partners, of Menlo Park, Calif., is expected to pay about $800 million for GXS. The transaction is expected to close by Halloween. Including its former incarnation as GE Information Services, GXS has been a […]

In early 2000, Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone left his post to join the new economy. Not a month into the new millennium, he founded Tilion Inc., a supply chain visibility software company. After two years at the helm – and no customer in production to show for his efforts – Stone left Tilion in […]

Solidifying its business integration offerings, Tibco Software Inc. announced Wednesday that the integration of its Talarian products is complete – and with the addition of the Talarian line, it has a complete suite of messaging products. Enterprise application integration software maker Tibco, of Palo Alto, Calif., purchased Talarian in January. In addition to adding three […]

Commerce One Inc. is reshaping itself in the image of a Web services integration software provider. The beleaguered e-marketplace provider turned procurement and collaboration software maker is now redesigning its namesake business-to-business collaboration platform to provide Web services and application integration capabilities. In addition to the new version, called Commerce One 6.0 and due to […]

Business process integration software maker Sierra Atlantic announced a partnership today with WebMethods Inc. to provide manufacturing customers with business process integration solutions. Sierras packaged integration software – called Application Networks – enables business processes to flow amongst enterprise applications. The companys SCM [supply chain management] and CRM [customer relationship management] software will sit on […]

Hoping to increase companies ability to quickly and inexpensively integrate small numbers of trading partners, Microsoft Corp. announced Monday Partner and Standard editions of its BizTalk Server 2002. The new editions are designed to help the tens of thousands of small trading partners that have not been able to integrate with outside partners because of […]

J.D. Edwards & Co. plans to offer its CRM applications running on the Linux operating system on IBM servers with IBM middleware. JDE and IBM announced the new customer relationship management offering jointly this week at the Focus 2002 JDE user conference, in JDEs hometown, Denver. The first application for the open-source operating system is […]

Peregrine Systems Inc. announced today it found a buyer for its Supply Chain Enablement unit and signed a loan and security agreement. Although its accounting remains in shambles and the company will have to restate three years of financial reports, Peregrine secured a $50 million loan with Foothill Capital Corp., an administrative agent for Ableco […]