Renee Boucher Ferguson

Icahn, Ellison Unlikely Allies in BEA Buyout Battle”> BEA is not in an enviable position. The company is caught between the cross hairs of two legendary corporate antagonists: Larry Ellison and Carl Icahn. Ellison, as the CEO of Oracle, pursued and won perhaps the only hostile takeover battle in the history of the software industry […]

BEAs dance card is empty, and Oracle is using that fact as a large lever against paying a premium for the company. In parlance typical to Oracle, its board of directors sniggered at BEAs counter bid of $21 per share—$4 more than Oracles proposal of $17 per share—characterizing the price as “an impossibly high price […]

The ball is back in Oracles court. BEA said Oct. 25 that it is prepared to talk about a sale of the company to Oracle—or any other potential bidders that have yet to step forward—at a price of $21 per share. The $21 per share price tag is $4 higher than Oracles offer. Oracle has […]

NetSuite, one of the few companies to offer a full on-demand enterprise resource planning suite, announced new technology Oct. 24 that should help the company build an ecosystem of partners that sell add-on software around its ERP suite. At its annual Revolution user conference in San Francisco Oct. 23-26, NetSuite announced SuiteBundler, a set of […]

Oracle is buying Interlace Systems, a company that develops on-demand operational planning software that helps business planners change operational assumptions on the fly, re-evaluate scenarios and assess business impacts. The terms of the deal, which was announced Oct. 24, were not disclosed. Interlace Systems software will fit into Oracles Enterprise Performance Management suite, with the […]

Oracle is giving BEA Systems another shot at being acquired. Oracle delivered a letter to BEAs board of directors Oct. 22 pleading with the directors to let BEAs shareholders determine its fate. Oracle requested that BEAs board sign its letter of acquisition to buy BEA—for $17 per share, or about $6.6 billion—and then put the […]

Microsoft wants to build a mobile device application platform as ubiquitous as Windows is on desktop PCs, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in his keynote address Oct. 23 at this years CTIA wireless conference in San Francisco. Ballmer unveiled the companys new mobile computing platform, the Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008, saying Microsoft […]

Microsoft is dropping the price 40 percent on its CRM Live hosting for partners who host—and resell—its customer relationship management software, hoping to drive partner demand in a non-partner space. The new price, announced Oct. 23 at Microsofts annual Convergence conference, in Copenhagen, is $15 per month per user, dangerously low for competitors, but in […]

Database administrators increasingly find open-source technologies in Oracle data centers. A recent poll of the Independent Oracle Users Group found 13 percent of user organizations are running a majority of applications on open source, up 30 percent from 2006, according to the survey, entitled “Open Source in the Enterprise: New Software Disrupts the Technology Stack.” […]

The Boeing Companys 787 Dreamliner was supposed to be a marvel of industrial planning and design. It is one of the first airliners to be completely digitally designed using PLM (product lifecycle management) software, and the first-ever virtual rollout of an aircraft. Using Dassault Systems PLM software, Boeing used exact 3-D models of parts and […]