Renee Boucher Ferguson

DALLAS—Microsoft Corp. revealed at this weeks RFID World conference here that it is developing an RFID infrastructure—one that its claims will affordably handle device management, event management, integration and application development. The infrastructure, in beta since January, is really an expansion of a middleware strategy Microsoft introduced just about a year ago. In April 2004, […]

DALLAS—The fourth annual RFID World event here this year holds few surprises in terms of customer adoption rates—it turns out most RFID implementations are still the result of mandates. That said, there is no lack of new technology to bring existing and potential customers along the RFID path. EPCglobals generation two standard, more colloquially known […]

RFID World, the Auto ID conference being held in Dallas this week, will feature a big crowd, small incremental technology advances and a continuing search for a business case. Theres little doubt that radio-frequency identification has become a hot topic—4,500 people are expected to attend this years event, compared with 3,000 the year before; there […]

Taking 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 components culled from Microsofts Dynamics enterprise resource planning software that can be snapped into Office and used from that environment. Mendocino, due this year, looks to tie SAPs ERP […]

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 […]