Renee Boucher Ferguson

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 […]

As with the evolution of the Web—or maybe because of it—the area of business process management and integration is seeing its own progression, from basic process modeling and integration to complex integration and execution. To facilitate this growth, vendors are building out new functionality to help users orchestrate business process flows. Intalio, for example, announced […]

With an eye toward research and innovation, Alien Technology on Feb. 6 opened its RFID Solutions Center in Dayton, Ohio. Alien Technology, based in Morgan Hill, Calif., develops RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags and readers. The research center is a collaborative effort, in as much as its open to Alien hardware manufacturing competitors, as well as […]

Where were you when the software went out? Salesforce.com executives and the companys customers are apparently agreeing to disagree over outages and their root causes. On Jan. 30, Salesforce.coms servers were down for several hours between about 10 a.m. and 2:15 p.m. EST, according to Salesforce.com customers such as Mark Siler, vice president of IT […]

NEW YORK—Michael Michlovich, marketing and sales IT Director at DuPont, has no plans to migrate off of his Salesforce.com customer relationship management subscription. Hell use it right alongside the newer implementation of SAPs on-demand CRM applications, he said. “Well roll out SAP as business conditions present themselves,” Michlovich said. “There are a number of sales […]