Renee Boucher Ferguson

Oracle is, finally, making waves with the on-demand CRM software it acquired when it bought Siebel Systems for $5.8 billion in January 2006. Oracle is rolling out the next iteration of its namesakes CRM On Demand software-Release 15-that adds new social networking and collaboration features to the software code. It’s also the first inklings of […]

SAP in the 1990s led the pack in ERP (enterprise resource planning) sales, growing to become the world’s largest business applications provider. But now with the -90s far behind it and a tapped enterprise market the company is looking for novel ways to grow its market share. While it has taken on new areas of […]

A company called VisualCalc provides a free Web site that helps citizens analyze the presidential race through a series of dashboards that chart the status and trends of the primary election. On the flip side, candidates in this year’s historical race for the White House-for the first time a woman and a black man are […]

The British Government won’t back down on its controversial plan to implement a national identification card system with data on every citizen, resident and long-term visitor stored on a single government database. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said March 6 the program will start with foreign nationals this year and work its way over the next […]

SAN FRANCISCO-OpSource is rolling out a new multi-tenant integration service bus that enables companies to consume and publish multiple Web services in the cloud from both software as a service and on-premise applications. CEO Treb Ryan said OpSource Connect, unveiled at the SAAS Summit 2008 here Feb. 28, is the first such integration service bus […]

LAS VEGAS-Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, said long-term research and development will carry the day at the company, despite mounting competition from the likes of fleet-footed Google, Yahoo’s reluctance to accept Microsoft’s $44.6 billion acquisition offer, and longstanding intimations from industry watchers that the software giant has lost its edge. Mundie spoke […]

Salesforce.com just keeps topping its own as well as Wall Street’s expectations, reporting a 50 percent jump in fourth-quarter revenues compared with the same quarter a year ago. The company’s strong fourth-quarter and fiscal 2008 results, released on Feb. 27, prompted it to increase its guidance for the coming year. In 2009 Salesforce.com expects to […]

LAS VEGAS-China is closing the technology gap with the U.S. every year, but it will be many years before it challenges the U.S. for dominance of the technology market, according to Fred Hu, co-head of Investment Banking for China at Goldman Sachs. The country is also improving human rights conditions and vows to resume a […]

LAS VEGAS – Goldman Sachs is putting a decidedly bleak spin on its U.S. IT spending outlook for the remainder of 2008. At the company’s Technology Investment Symposium here in Las Vegas, analysts said tech spending in the U.S. market will likely decrease by two percentage points, from 7 percent in 2007 to 5 percent […]

Lawson Software announced Feb. 22 that it has agreed to acquire VasTech, a workforce management software vendor. The acquisition strengthens Lawson’s vertical market strategy as well its human capital management play. VasTech has 45 employees. The company’s workforce management software is aimed at the health care, hospitality and gaming industries with staffing and scheduling applications. […]

A preliminary report released Feb. 20 by three independent directors investigating the stunning $7.1 billion loss at Soci??«t??« G??«n??«rale found that rogue trader J??«r??me Kerviel began making unauthorized trades as early as 2005 and that the bank’s internal controls failed to uncover his activities. The report, commissioned by Soci??«t??« G??«n??«rale’s board of directors and reviewed […]

While green IT is gaining a lot of attention and investment in the high-tech industry, the related concept of corporate social responsibility has only been tackled by a few of the largest software developers in the business. But now CSR (corporate social responsibility) software, which gives enterprises tools for tracking the amount of resources, such […]