Robert J. Mullins

SAN FRANCISCO — Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn’t pass up an opportunity to put down software rival Salesforce.com, especially at his company’s OpenWorld conference here Oct. 1 to 4. However, it looks like Oracle borrowed some ideas from its main software as a service competitor in building a new partner ecosystem. At the conference, Oracle […]

Samsung is asking for a new trial to reverse a jury verdict in a case brought by Apple, alleging that the jury foreman failed to disclose his involvement in another lawsuit that could indicate bias against Samsung. Documents filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., accuse jury foreman Velvin Hogan of failing to […]

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle CEO Larry Ellison introduced his company’s Social Relationship Management Platform at the Oracle OpenWorld conference with the claim that it differs from all competing enterprise social media products in that it is a platform, not just an application. Because the social media capabilities are built as a platform, those capabilities are part of […]

The Lync unified communications platform has been a strong product for Microsoft, with revenue growing by 45 percent in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2012 that ended June 30, compared to the year ago quarter. But a number of Lync deployments are limited by the complexity of connecting an enterprise’s network for external telecommunications […]

HP Logo Is Prominent in New DAS Data Center Hewlett-Packard gave reporters a tour of a new data center it designed in Atlanta for Diversified Agency Services (DAS), a marketing services firm. The 2,470-square foot data center is housed in a data center hosting company called Quality Technology Services. B.G. Naran Leads Data Center Tour […]

Technology product design needs to be about turning available technology into a product that performs a particular task, but also about delivering a positive experience to the end user. Cisco Systems is combining those two concerns into a new job title it believes is an industry first: the CTEO, or chief technology experience officer. “We […]

ATLANTA – Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems are in a heated rivalry in the networking space, and HP touts every case in which it wins over a Cisco customer. But HP had to concede that it couldn’t provide all the networking components needed to build a new data center here. In developing a brand-new data center […]

Samsung filed documents in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., asking a judge to set aside the Aug. 24 verdicts against the company in a patent suit brought by Apple, as Samsung alludes to possible jury misconduct in the case. In recently filed documents, Samsung argues that “no reasonable jury” would support Apple’s claims […]

Tibco Software says its experience as a provider of business process management applications gives its enterprise social media platform, tibbr, an advantage over other such platforms flooding the market based on the popularity of Facebook in the broad consumer market. Tibco introduced Sept. 26, at its TUCON user conference in Las Vegas, tibbr 4.0, with […]

The Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) convened again in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 24 as Microsoft touts email’s continued importance as part of a unified communications strategy along with instant messaging, presence, voice, text and enterprise social media. MEC returns after a 10-year absence mainly to help Microsoft promote the coming Exchange Server 2013 and its […]

At first glance it might seem unusual that former Secretary of State and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell would be a keynoter at a tech conference. But onstage at the Dreamforce 2012 conference hosted by Salesforce.com, Powell declared his tech bona fides. “I’m proud to say that it was the American […]

Two of the IT industry’s biggest companies were singled out for criticism for shielding profits from U.S. corporate income taxes by transferring the funds to offshore accounts. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were identified by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as companies that use offshore units to shield billions of dollars from U.S. taxes by […]