Robert J. Mullins

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is known for his hyperbole and bombast. He once bounded onstage at an employee event, jumping around and screaming, “I LOVE this company,” which helped him earn the nickname “Monkey Boy.” This time, the hyperbole seems to have been a case of lack of clarification of his remarks earlier about Windows […]

When SAP America announced on May 22 its plans to acquire Ariba for $4.3 billion, much was made about how SAP, whose business was originally built around on-premise software, was making another cloud-computing play. But the real significance is in the software Ariba distributes and the network it operates to complete procurement transactions, analysts say. […]

Oracle is acquiring Vitrue, a cloud-based social media marketing campaign creator that enables customers to create, manage and measure social media marketing campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Google+. Oracle said that Vitrue, combined with Oracle’s existing sales, service, commerce, social data management and analytics capabilities, will create “the most advanced […]

SAP announced it is going to acquire Ariba, the provider of a cloud-based buyer-seller collaboration network for $4.3 billion, giving SAP an entrée into the fast-growing collaboration technology market. SAP America, the U.S. subsidiary of the German enterprise software giant SAP AG, made the deal to acquire Ariba at $45 a share, which is a […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Open source has become the dominant choice for mobile device operating systems because it’s the best way to bring innovation to this growing market and because wide community support delivers the highest quality software, said the president of Funambol, an open-source mobile software company. “On mobile, we won. There’s just no other […]

Device security startup NetAuthority emerged from stealth mode on May 22 with a beta product it says protects access to Websites, Web-based applications and software as a service apps with a layer of security that basic username and password technology doesn’t provide. The NetAuthority security application installs a lightweight software client on each registered device, […]

SAN FRANCISCO – As Microsoft continues to deepen its relationship with the open-source software movement, it announced May 21 that it plans to release a beta version of a new product that enables data centers to manage Linux servers with the Microsoft System Center management platform. At the Open Source Business Conference 2012 here, Microsoft […]

Mobile computing, cloud computing and analyzing huge amounts of data are among the top IT trends in 2012 and are also the focus of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2012 that begins May 21 in San Francisco. About 40 percent of the new open-source projects started in 2011 were related to cloud computing, 19 […]

Enhancements to Microsoft’s Windows Server 2012 beta, including to Hyper-V, are a match for VMware’s capability and could give data center operators reason to switch from market leader VMware, experts said at a Microsoft IT workshop in Silicon Valley. Hyper-V in Server 2012 improves security and isolation in multi-tenant cloud environments, allows the migration of […]

Payday had been a tense day for Celia Heywood, the vice president of sales solutions for Bank of America Merchant Services. Salespeople would complain to her when they felt they’d been shorted on their commissions, resulting in “hours of angry phone calls,” she said.Once Merchant Services switched to automated SaaS-delivered software, phone calls became more […]

SAP is throwing more support behind its HANA in-memory computing platform with the introduction of eight new business applications, a mix of on-premise and cloud-delivered solutions. At its Sapphire user conference in Orlando, Fla., SAP launched HANA apps such as the Sales and Operations Planning tool that translates demand fluctuations into plans for adjusting manufacturing, […]

SAP is rolling out a suite of cloud-delivered applications that are tied to its February acquisition of SuccessFactors. The strategy is to offer cloud computing and application services for businesses in four specific categories: people, money, customers and suppliers. SAP executives detailed the company’s new cloud offerings at the Sapphire Now conference, which kicked off […]