John Pallatto

SAP CEO Leo Apotheker has resigned after he and the SAP supervisory board “reached a mutual agreement” not to extend Apotheker’s contract as a member of the SAP executive board, the Germany-based software and services company announced on Feb. 7. With his resignation, the SAP executive board appointed two co-CEOs, Bill McDermott, head of SAP’s […]

Chatter Gives Salesforce.com a Facebook Look and Feel by John Pallatto Saleforce Redesigns User Interface for Chatter Introduction Personal home pages on Salesforce.com have been redesigned to take on a more Facebook-like appearance. When Salesforce.com releases Chatter in 2010, the standard Salesforce status page, with its dashboards and reports, will sport the user’s profile photo […]

SAN FRANCISCO-After watching Facebook and Twitter build huge membership lists over the last several years, Salesforce.com has moved to make “social collaboration” an organic part of its cloud-based customer relationship management platform. The company introduced Salesforce Chatter, which it describes as a “secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform,” as the highlight of the […]

Oracle’s $7.4 billion acquisition offer of Sun Microsystems gives CEO Larry Ellison a chance to do something he probably has always wanted to do-build a vertically integrated hardware and software company along the lines of IBM and Hewlett-Packard. He built Oracle into one of the top software companies in the world. Oracle has consistently turned […]

At first it looked like IBM pulled the plug on the deal by lowering its buyout offer and as a result giving Sun an offer it just had to refuse. But the news reports from Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and other news services presented conflicting views of the situation. Reuters has reported that IBM […]

SAN FRANCISCO-Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft Business Division, voiced vague indications at Web 2.0 Expo that Microsoft will eventually offer a mobile version of Office for the iPhone, a move that has been rumored for almost as long as Apple’s smartphone has been on the market. Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, the organizer of […]

Working as a member of the editorial team that launched eWEEK in early 1984 was a heady and sometimes chaotic time. Not only were we dealing with the confusion and uncertainty that usually accompanies the launch of a brand-new publication, but we were all learning about enterprise desktop computing as we went along. When Ziff- […]

John Wookey, the former head of application development for Oracle’s Fusion applications, started work on Nov. 10 with Oracle’s archrival SAP as senior vice president of Large Enterprise On Demand applications. In this position, Wookey will work with several of SAP’s “large enterprise on-demand offerings,” including SAP CRM on demand with the goal of developing […]

Salesforce.com, a 9-year-old company that has grown mostly from internal expansion, disclosed on Aug. 20 that it has acquired AppExchange partner InStranet, the producer of customer service knowledge base technology, for $31.5 million. InStranet’s knowledge base technology is used by business-to-consumer or business-to-business customer service call centers to give service agents online reference and policy […]

SAP is going to kill off its ill-fated TomorrowNow acquisition by winding down its remaining application support operations by the end of October. SAP is locked in a bruising legal battle with Oracle, which claims that TomorrowNow illegally downloaded copyrighted Oracle product support documentation and code. However, the decision to close down the remaining TomorrowNow […]