Renee Boucher Ferguson

A judge in U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled that Oracle and SAP should try to settle charges of intellectual property theft and copyright infringement through mediation. Oracle, however, says it wants no part of any mediation efforts and intends to file new claims against SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary. The judge’s order for […]

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com migrated a subset of its overall user base to its Spring ’08 release. In the process, Salesforce.com experienced an outage to its NA5 server Feb. 11 that lasted, intermittently, for about 7 hours and affected a small set of customers. On the same day, BlackBerry users found only a black hole […]

Business Objects announced Feb. 12 the next major iteration of its BusinessObjects XI platform-a release it has dubbed the industry’s first intelligence platform. It is also Business Objects’ first major release since it came under the SAP umbrella in January, when SAP completed its nearly $7 billion acquisition of the French business intelligence software maker. […]

SugarCRM Chairman and CEO John Roberts is convinced that the era of open-source applications is upon us. So he told eWEEK Senior Writer Renee Boucher Ferguson on the eve of the company’s second annual SugarCon conference Feb. 6-8. And in many ways it has. Open-source operating systems such as Linux have become mainstream, as have […]

Two high profile banking scandals have many companies rethinking their policies and cultural attitudes about regulatory compliance and risk mitigation. The most recent scandal has hit particularly close to home at Wachovia, one of the largest banks in the United States. Wachovia bank executives are accused of collaborating with fraudulent telemarketing companies that siphoned cash […]

Brenda Dietrich is a research fellow within the mathematics department of IBM’s research division. Dietrich attended IBM’s launch of Cognos and spoke with eWEEK senior writer Renee Boucher Ferguson about her department’s plans to work with Cognos, and what might be accomplished by applying mathematical techniques to traditional business intelligence. What is the focus of […]

Oracle’s acquisition of Hyperion last year started an avalanche of consolidation in the business intelligence sector. Its pending purchase of BEA Systems might start a merger mania in the middleware sector. To wit: On-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) software maker Workday announced Feb. 6 its acquisition of Cape Clear Software, which develops integration technology. While […]

IBM plans to prove that math is fundamental. Now that it has closed the books on its $5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software maker Cognos, IBM has said it will differentiate itself in the fast-consolidating BI market thanks to its decades-long research and development of sophisticated analytics derived from some serious mathematical expertise. “IBM […]

Oracle has big plans for its Application Integration Architecture. Officials with the software vendor say the platform will eventually be a set of development standards and methodologies for Oracle, its customers and its partners. It also will be a way to efficiently bring together the many disparate applications under Oracle’s ever-expanding umbrella-and outside the Oracle […]

Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo Feb. 1 is clearly a push by Microsoft for a greater share of the online advertising market dominated by Google. That said there also are implications for enterprise applications users as well. And those too come back to Google. Microsoft has for some time been trying to make inroads […]