Renee Boucher Ferguson

Google Gears, the recently released open-source technology that lets developers create offline Web applications, is one more indication that on-demand application users are looking for more offline capabilities. Whats needed, according to industry analysts, are improved development environments that enable companies to more seamlessly give users offline access to diverse data sources from on-demand and […]

SAP AG has appointed a new chief technology officer. The company announced May 30 it has promoted Vishal Sikka to head its newly formed Office of the CTO. Sikka is the former senior vice president of architecture and chief software architect at SAP. In his new role, Sikka is chartered with leading the companys technology […]

At its first developer conference May 21 centered on Apex, Salesforce.coms yet-to-be-released on-demand programming language, the company announced a new platform capability that will help developers build on-demand applications. Salesforce SOA, revealed at the Santa Clara conference, allows the Apex code to not only produce Web services—Salesforce users have been able to do that since […]

With Oracles intended $495 million acquisition of software maker Agile Software, product lifecycle management may finally have its day. PLM software, which manages a products life cycle from design and material procurement through marketing and after-sales, promises manufacturers shorter time to market through process automation and efficiencies. But that promise has been slow to materialize. […]

On-demand software provider Salesforce.com announced its fiscal first quarter 2008 earnings that highlighted a 42 percent increase in net paying customers and a $0.1 profit on earnings per share. The company posted first-quarter net income of $730,000, which amounted to the penny-per-share profit, compared with a net loss of $229,000 or break even per share, […]

The enterprise software market is in flux, with applications vendors morphing into platform providers, service-based architecture concepts ruling development investments, consolidations dominating the marketplace and customers looking for better pricing models that move beyond annual licenses. The changes, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report, State of the Software Industry 2007, have led to […]

With a new tagline of “Search, Ads and Apps” announced May 14, and a new presentation application coming soon to complete the desktop quatrain of spreadsheets, word processing, presentation and e-mail, Google is poised to take on the world of desktop computing with the added ease of online collaboration. While its long been speculated whether […]

Top-tier business intelligence vendors are beginning to court chief financial officers of the world through new and upcoming tools designed to help answer crucial questions about the health of their companies. Microsoft, Oracle and SAP each have recently announced acquisitions and strategies to win CFOs hearts by providing CPM (corporate performance management) applications backed by […]

At its annual international Sapphire user event, this year held in Vienna, SAP is stressing several themes centered on the notion of helping companies to keep up with global changes—mandates, regulations, consolidations—and to differentiate themselves by implementing SOA-based technology for a more agile business. Underscoring the notion of a consolidating global market, SAP, headquartered in […]

Cognos is putting its Celequest acquisition to work. At its annual user conference in Orlando this week, Cognos announced May 14 a new family of appliance-based performance management and business intelligence software. Cognos Now also is available as a service. The appliance consists of operational BI—a sort of generalized roll out of BI and analytic […]