Renee Boucher Ferguson

The European Parliaments Scientific Technology Options Assessment group released an 86-page study evaluating the use of RFID technology in everyday European life, from credit cards and retail applications to travel systems and passports. The study, titled “RFID and Identity Management in Every Day Life,” reaches a compelling but not surprising conclusion: There is a precarious […]

If youre a NetSuite user and you havent plunked down $500 for an iPhone yet, you now have more incentive to seek out the closest Apple store. NetSuite introduced on July 12 a mobile application access interface called SuitePhone that will allow iPhone users to link up to information stored in the latest version of […]

Earlier this month, after at least two years of rumors and speculation, NetSuite filed for its initial public offering. While the IPO is good news for the software as a service sector, where NetSuite is considered a strong contender, NetSuites S-1 filing reveals some troubling vulnerabilities. Perhaps the biggest concern: NetSuite supports all of its […]

The hoopla around Oracles ongoing lawsuit against rival SAP has left a gaping hole for customers questioning the value of major application vendor support. Oracle is accusing SAP of corporate theft on a grand scale, the result of SAP subsidiary TomorrowNow downloading too much documentation in the process of providing third-party support for Oracle customers. […]

Microsoft is giving notice that it plans to directly challenge Salesforce.coms online application marketplace, AppExchange, and on-demand programming language and platform, Apex. Microsoft announced at their World Wide Partner Conference in Denver this week the planned launch, in 2008, of a new on-demand marketplace in which Microsoft partners can showcase their company, applications and templates […]

Oracle may command 47 percent of the database market, but the company is pushing headlong into a saturated market with little room for growth, according to some analysts. At first blush, Oracles market position looks unassailable. Oracle has experienced 14.9 percent market growth over the last year, besting the market average of 14.2 percent growth, […]

Microsofts pricing for its Dynamics Live CRM is undercutting the competition by about half, and partner compensation for on-demand sales is about 20 percent less than it is for annual subscription rates. The software giant announced the long-awaited product and pricing information for its on-demand customer relationship management offering at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference […]

Googles July 9 acquisition of Postini is another clear sign that the search giant is staking a claim in the on-demand enterprise applications market and ratcheting up the heat in the already sizzling software as a service sector, especially against Microsoft. With Postini, which began as an e-mail filtering company and evolved into compliance technology […]

At an analyst day event in January 2005, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison sent a stern warning to rival SAP. It was just a month after Oracles controversial takeover of PeopleSoft, a move that kicked off a two-year-plus buying spree that has put the Redwood Shores, Calif., software maker into the middle of the highly competitive […]

In 2006, Miro Consulting was ranked No. 15 on Doloittes list of 500 fastest growing tech companies and No. 397 on Inc. Magazines 500 ranking of the fastest growing privately held companies in the United States. The company has had a three-year growth rate of 362 percent. What makes Miro so successful? Its in a […]