John Pallatto

PC spreadsheet software brought about a fundamental change in the way that the corporate number crunchers—the accountants, financial analysts, stock traders and marketing managers—got access to the computing power they needed to do their jobs. PC Week, the predecessor of today’s eWEEK, closely followed the astounding growth in the use of PCs and spreadsheets in […]

In 1983, several technology and business trends were converging to demonstrate that computing had permanently broken out of the air-conditioned glass house and was moving into homes, schools and on the desktops at businesses of every size and description. That was also the year that a small group of editors and writers gathered in the […]

Andy Rubin, the father of the Android, the most widely used mobile operating system in the world, has stepped down as the head of Google’s mobile group apparently to pursue as-yet-unknown new ventures within the company. “Andy’s decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google,” CEO Larry Page […]

SAN FRANCISCO – NetSuite will use its cloud ERP platform as the backbone of a new greatly expanded commerce as a service initiative that allows enterprises of all sizes to manage business-to-consumer or business-to-business transactions on any device. Called SuiteCommerce, the platform provides all the development and transactional tools to enable users to build commerce […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Performance improvements, simplified navigation with ready access to full text search are some of the improvements in Sugar 6.5, the latest version of SugarCRM’s customer relationship management package that it officially introduced Tuesday during its annual SugarCon user conference here. SugarCRM, a fast-growing but still relatively small provider of CRM software, compared […]

For Oracle, it’s a new week and time for another corporate acquisition. This week, it’s RightNow Technologies, which markets cloud customer service and support applications. Oracle agreed to pay $1.5 billion for RightNow’s stock at about $43 a share, which is about 20 percent more than the company’s closing price on Oct. 21. Oracle says […]

SAP plans to buy out Crossgate, a business-to-business electronic data exchange service that allows trading partners to securely transmit critical business information, including production orders, specifications and invoices. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Crossgate, which was founded in 2001 and is based in Munich, Germany, allows enterprises to set up dedicated secure […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Flushed with success from the rapid adoption of the Chatter social networking program, Salesforce.com kicked off its annual Dreamforce user conference here Aug. 31 by saying businesses of all sizes should get ready to build the “social enterprise.” Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says they can do this by using Chatter within the […]

Eager to win more converts to its enterprise social networking platform, Yammer is introducing a suite of products designed to make it easier for business users to share information and take instant action on information generated from line of business applications, including sales, finance and supply chain systems. Facing intense competition in enterprises from Salesforce.com’s […]

Oracle has issued an update to the MySQL Enterprise Edition 5.5 database package that includes 24/7 worldwide customer support that effectively allows MySQL customers to access the same product support infrastructure as Oracle Database customers, according company officials. By providing access to a common customer support system, Oracle says MySQL customers will experience faster problem […]