Renee Boucher Ferguson

While it has no plans to go out and compete head-to-head with Google, SAP is building out its enterprise search capabilities with business intelligence functionality, according to Lothar Schubert, Business Intelligence solution strategy lead for SAP. Schubert said the company has a search engine (with the internal name of TREX) that is being used currently […]

/zimages/4/127384.jpgMIAMI—As major business applications and platform providers Microsoft, SAP and Oracle undergo their own technology transformations to build out business process-centric systems based on service oriented architectures, process modeling software developer IDS Scheer AG finds itself in an interesting position. The company, which has had a U.S. base for the past decade, is in some […]

Taking the lessons learned from its joint Mendocino development project with SAP in-house, Microsoft announced on Feb. 20 its namesake Dynamics Snap initiative. The initiative consists of mini-functionality components culled from Microsofts Dynamics ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that can be snapped into Office and utilized from that environment. Mendocino, due this year, looks to […]

Those episodes of “M*A*S*H” when Radar gets a load of swimsuits in the dead of winter and a half-million tongue depressors instead of medicine were funny, but in real life, its no joke when the supply chain breaks down and lives are at stake. During the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, the U.S. […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison wasnt kidding when he said earlier in February that the company is looking to fill holes in its middleware stack. On the heels of its SleepyCat embedded open-source database acquisition Feb. 14, Oracle announced the following day its purchase of HotSip AB. HotSip, a Sweden-based company, provides telecommunications infrastructure software through […]

In addition to its SleepyCat open-source database acquisition announcement on Feb. 14, Oracle also said it would divest its OnTarget business unit, which it acquired when it bought Siebel Systems on Jan. 31. OnTarget, itself acquired by Siebel for $259 million about seven years ago, provides a suite of training programs and professional services for […]

SAP doesnt believe it needs one. Salesforce.com offers one only upon request. NetSuite provides one as part of its standard license agreement but with enough wiggle room to allow for several hours of unscheduled downtime a month, on top of scheduled outages for upgrades. SLAs (service-level agreements), which provide a guaranteed uptime rate to on-demand […]

Oracle clarified some looming questions during its Feb. 9 conference call with analysts to lay out its integration plans for Siebel Systems. First, Oracle plans to lay off more of its own employees than it does Siebels employees—about 2,000 in total, trimming about $400 million in costs. The layoffs, scheduled to occur over the next […]

SAP AG doesnt believe it needs one. Salesforce.com only offers one upon request. NetSuite provides one as part of its standard license agreement, but with enough wiggle room to allow for several hours of unscheduled downtime a month, on top of scheduled outages for upgrades. These are SLAs (service-level agreements), which provide a guaranteed uptime […]

With Oracles $5.85 billion acquisition of customer relationship management rival Siebel Systems Inc. wrapped up as of Jan. 31, the jettisoning of extra employees has begun, according to Wall Street analysts. An Oracle spokesperson was not available at press time, but the company is hosting a news conference Feb. 9 to talk about its Siebel […]

IBM is adding supply chain management and business-to-business integration capabilities to its consulting organization with the acquisition of Viacore, announced Feb. 8. The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. Viacore helps companies integrate with their suppliers. It offers a suite of software applications, dubbed BusinessTone, which it defines as an on-demand partner integration […]

With its purchase of G-Log in 2005, Oracle acquired a logistics and transportation management software development team—along with a suite of accompanying technology—that lets users plan, optimize, execute and analyze the movement of goods across their supply chain. Over the past five months, Oracle has been working to integrate G-Logs capabilities into its own supply […]