Renee Boucher Ferguson

Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T, has marked two significant events in this first month of the new year. The companys president and CEO, Samuel Starr, died Dec. 31 of an undisclosed illness, and on Jan. 8, the company completed its $155 million acquisition of Comergent Technologies, a deal forged by Starr. According to a […]

Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland As, is now in the software game, with NetSuites Jan. 4 announcement that it has appointed Beane to its board of directors. NetSuite develops on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) software and sells it as a service. Bean manages a low-budget but winning Major League Baseball team. Where do […]

On-demand customer relationship management vendor RightNow Technologies stumbled badly in its fourth quarter. The company issued a warning late in the afternoon of Jan. 4 that its fourth-quarter 2006 revenues would see a shortfall, as will its earnings. Company officials said fourth-quarter revenues, which will be reported Jan. 31, will come in at about $28 […]

Gentag, which bills itself as an IP development company, announced Dec. 28 that it has been issued a patent for a way to add sensor networks to RFID readers in wireless devices such as cell phones, PDAs and laptops. The RFID Based Sensor Networks patent, numbered 7148804, provides the basis for the creation of RFID […]

It turns out 2006 wasnt quite the banner year for RFID adoption that some analysts had predicted–particularly in the retail and consumer packaged goods sectors where fast growth was expected. And it looks like the coming year wont be much different. Analysts are predicting some pockets of growth–asset tracking and contactless smart cards, for example–while […]

For companies that use enterprise applications from the leading vendors, 2007 to some degree wont offer many surprises. The top vendors—SAP, Oracle and to some degree, Microsoft—will continue investing in service-oriented architectures and will grow their investments in software as a service, according to industry observers. All three companies will continue their investments in their […]

IBM is building on its existing WebSphere RFID middleware stack with the Dec. 15 introduction of its WebSphere RFID Information Center. The new technology provides a standard way to collect the massive amounts of data that is expected to be created by sensors and RFID tags, and then links that data to existing processes, and […]

The separate initiatives put forth by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to utilize RFID in passports, identification cards and drivers licenses are coming under fire from various directions. At issue are concerns that the radio-frequency identification method of storing data on national electronic ID cards—the e-passport, PASScard and electronic […]

The Prescription Drug Marketing Act set to go into effect in January 2007 that would require a prescription drug “pedigree” or electronic paper trail on distributed pharmaceuticals, has hit another snag. A federal lawsuit filed by eight pharmaceutical wholesalers against the FDAs Department of Health and Human Services, has been answered with a preliminary injunction […]

Intalio is moving deeper into the open-source community. The maker of business process management software announced Dec. 12 that it is releasing its Intalio/BPMS Community Edition suite under the Mozilla Public License. While Intalio recently passed the 100 paying customers milestone, CEO and founder Ismael Ghalimi believes that by making its software available to the […]

Just about a year after Salesforce.com unveiled its AppExchange application marketplace, the company is announcing an e-commerce engine to back it up. Sort of. Salesforce.com announced Dec. 12 its strategy and vision for AppStore, the monetization of the AppExchange marketplace that the company plans to release in a phased rollout throughout 2007. “This is really […]

SAP is looking to an aggressive midmarket push to help triple its customer base over the next four years and stave off competition from the likes of Oracle and Microsoft. In his keynote speech Dec. 4 at the companys annual analyst conference here, Shai Agassi, president of SAPs Product and Technology Group and a member […]