Renee Boucher Ferguson

A little perspective. Thats what SAP executives tried to provide shareholders and analysts during its July 20 second-quarter and half-year 2006 earnings call. SAP, the worlds largest business applications developer, announced June 13 that it would miss analysts expectations for software revenue growth for the second quarter. The company, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, said July […]

While SAP AG isnt expected to make any earthshaking announcements at its upcoming July 20 second quarter earnings call—the cat is already out of the bag that SAP will miss analyst expectations for earnings—the company will look to dispel any notions that Oracle is gaining market share. It may also disclose acquisition plans, according to […]

At its worldwide partner Conference in Boston July 11-13, Microsoft made what CEO Steve Ballmer referred to as the single most inevitable announcement in the history of Microsoft: Dynamics CRM Live, Microsofts answer to software as a service in the business applications world. Dynamics CRM Live, due in the second quarter of next year, is […]

First there was VeriChip, the company that developed a human-implantable RFID chip the size of a grain of rice. And now theres Hewlett-Packard, with new “stick almost anywhere” chip technology thats even smaller than a grain of rice and carries a whole lot more data than any RFID chip. HP announced July 17 that its […]

Two U.S. senators, Byron Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, and John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, launched the U.S. Senate RFID Caucus in mid-July to educate colleagues about the potential uses and benefits of RFID. The first official meeting, held July 13 in Washington, D.C., included the co-chairing senators and a group of panelists […]

Boston—Software as a service has taken on a new meaning for small business owners that touch, in any way, the payments industry. Thanks to the combined forces of a software infrastructure from IP Commerce, the IP Payments Framework, and a consortium of payment processors, data aggregators and small business lenders—including the likes of Chase Bank […]

BOSTON—Microsoft has announced—finally—its version of on-demand CRM software. For more than a year the software giant has nosed around the fact that its working on customer relationship management as a service, but it wasnt until its annual Worldwide Partner Conference here July 11-13 that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live made its formal debut. On July 11, […]

BOSTON-Microsoft is, without actually saying it, positioning its Dynamics AX 4.0 release for the enterprise to compete with products from the likes of SAP and Oracle. And its working hard to convince partners that moving forward with the Dynamics brand is the winning approach to take. At its Worldwide Partner Conference here July 11 through […]

At Microsofts worldwide Partner Conference in Boston July 11-13, the company again is hoping to go vertical via its massive Microsoft Business Solutions partner channel to become a bigger enterprise resource planning player. At the Worldwide Partner Conference in Minneapolis last year, the push from on high was to create a sea change within the […]

Wary of mounting acquisitions in the business applications sector harming his enterprise resource planning investment, John Rogelstad searched for an alternative that could carry his small cut-and-sew manufacturing company to the next level. He took an unexpected turn down the open-source ERP road. The director of operations at Marena Group, a manufacturer for post-surgical garments, […]