Renee Boucher Ferguson

San Clemente is a picturesque surfer city in southern Orange County, Calif. But away from the shoreline, things werent always so pretty when it came to running San Clementes computer systems. The city government operated three different—and, in some cases, very outdated—transactional platforms, a situation that created a lack of visibility between systems and departments. […]

The long-awaited California bill to regulate the use of radio-frequency identification in state and local documents has been quashed. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger quietly vetoed SB 768 last weekend. Buried in a list of 73 bills vetoed Sept. 30 is the notification that SB 768, the Identity Information Protection Act of 2006, didnt make the cut. […]

A relative startup company with a first round of funding in 2004, Reva Systems is capturing the attention of major partners. The result: better RFID data manageability and understanding at both the network and applications level. The company announced Oct. 3 that it has received investments from both Cisco Systems, and SAP Ventures, a division […]

Ann Winblad, a co-founding partner of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and to many in the software industry a bellwether of successful trends, believes that software as a service is beyond the tipping point of customer adoption. With SAAS no longer the domain of small companies that cant afford on-premises software implementations, users extend across a […]

SAP AG said on Sept. 28 that it hired Uwe Herold to take on the CIO role at the company. Herold will be based at the companys global headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Whats notable about Herolds hiring is that he is rising not from the ranks of the company—as the majority of board-level executives have […]

Hoping to land more than a glancing blow against Oracles claims that SAP is far from standards based, SAP plans to announce September 29 that the latest version of its application server is now certified on Suns Java EE 5 standard. Even before Oracle. The certification means that customers and partners can develop Java applications […]

In 2005, the actions of a small-town school district in Northern California set off a chain of events that could lead to groundbreaking legislation limiting the use of RFID in California and, if other states pick up the rallying call, across the nation. Last year, the Brittan Elementary School District in Sutter, Calif., required all […]

Oracles better-than-expected earnings report Sept. 19 for the first quarter of fiscal 2007 inspired some SAP bashing from CEO Larry Ellison, but a look behind the numbers indicates the war between the two applications giants is far from being decided. Oracle reported net income of $670 million on revenue of $3.6 billion, and earnings of […]

RFID may disappear for Symbol Technologies, and too, for Motorola. Thats the whisper among industry experts speculating over the future of Symbols radio frequency technology in the wake of Motorolas bid to acquire the company. Motorola announced Sept. 19 that it would acquire Symbol for about $3.9 billion. While there are several schools of thought […]

In 2005, the actions of a small-town school district in Northern California set off a chain of events that could lead to ground-breaking legislation limiting the use of RFID in California and, if other states pick up the rallying call, across the nation. Last year the Brittan Elementary School District in Sutter, Calif., required all […]