Renee Boucher Ferguson

IBM is putting its considerable resources into building enterprise search technologies, both in its Lotus and WebSphere product lines and in areas of research and development like terrorist communication mapping or pharmaceutical drug interaction tracking. IBM announced June 29 the latest version of its namesake OmniFind Enterprise Edition that essentially brings an enterprise dashboard that […]

Powering the stellar fourth quarter numbers Oracle announced yesterday—total revenues up 17 percent to 5.8 billion, beating the Street estimate of $5.6 billion—is an acquisition strategy that seems, on the surface at least, to be growing revenue and successfully making inroads into SAPs customer base. During the earnings call yesterday, Oracles CEO Larry Ellison outlined […]

Oracle reported a booming fourth quarter, with the company posting net income of $1.6 billion, or 31 cents per share, up from $1.3 billion or 24 cents per share for the same quarter a year ago. During its earnings call June 26, Oracle said its profit and sales for the 2007 fiscal fourth quarter that […]

Oracles June 21 announcement of a massive new business unit geared to the needs of the financial markets raises as many questions as Stonehenge. None is more pressing than how Oracle hopes to bring its products to market without creating more work than its worth for its customers. The company intends to build a financial […]

Microsoft has reached the halfway point in its three-year march to converge four enterprise resource planning suites into a common technology platform. But its still an open question whether the campaign will deliver a fully converged suite that will hold its own in the midmarket that SAP and Oracle also covet, and whether customers still […]

Database and applications management provider Quest Software took another step into the Microsoft Windows sector with the June 21 acquisition of ScriptLogic. Quest agreed to acquire ScriptLogic, which develops Microsoft-based network administration and life-cycle management software, for approximately $90 million. The company already snatched up Aelita Software and Vintela, two widely known Windows management providers, […]

BOSTON—Despite the obvious differences in technology interests between Gen X, Gen Y or the upcoming Gen Alpha, there seems to be a common thread in getting just about any aged employee to use Web 2.0 technologies: Build it and they will come—for the most part. Following the rule that if it takes more than two […]

Savi Technology, now a Lockheed Martin company, is continuing its trek around the globe to push its supply chain products into other nations and software products. The company announced on June 19 that it secured a pan-NATO contract for its RFID technology and services, and joined in a partnership with IFS Defense to integrate its […]

Microsoft has reached the halfway point in its long march to converge its four separate Enterprise Resource Planning suites into a common technology platform. But its still an open question whether this now three-year-long campaign will deliver a fully converged suite that will hold its own in the midsize market that SAP and Oracle also […]

Imagine a world where every single manufactured item is tagged with a tiny RFID chip that holds various bits of information about that item. And as each item moves along a supply chain—pharmaceutical, aerospace, consumer goods, automotive, livestock or even human identification—information is gathered, stored and accessed at various points in a mixture of systems. […]

At a time when the President Bush is under fire for his immigration reform initiatives and the software industry is up in arms over intellectual property rights, Oracle has hired a Washington D.C. law firm to press its case in both matters. Oracle hired Barbour Griffith & Rogers to lobby the federal government on immigration, […]

On three separate occasions in recent months, the Food and Drug Administration nabbed counterfeit drugs off the Internet—from 24 different Web sites. On a global scale, more than 10 percent of the drugs sold around the world are counterfeit, according to the World Health Organization. The problem, in existence for years, appears to be worsening. […]