Renee Boucher Ferguson

After some potentially hairy turns in 2007 – from a massive infusion vestment in the midmarket with a new business model for its new on-demand suite to the potentially overpriced acquisition of Business Objects – SAP proved it’s on solid ground with new investments. The company posted heartening full-year 2007 results that included a 13 […]

The U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis and the global economic problems that followed may or may not be responsible for creating conditions that led to the recent scandal at Soci??«t??« G??«n??«rale, France’s third largest bank. Regardless, the mortgage crisis and the trading scandal at Soci??«t??« G??«n??«rale do have some similarities. In each, risk management and compliance […]

Whether or not SAP sells its third-party support subsidiary TomorrowNow, Oracle plans to pursue its legal case against SAP. And the two parties are not in settlement negotiations, an Oracle spokeswoman said Jan. 25. “If SAP sells TomorrowNow, that will not affect Oracle’s right to maintain its lawsuit against SAP and TomorrowNow,” said Oracle spokeswoman […]

IBM is looking to beef up its service-oriented architecture portfolio by buying AptSoft, a private company that develops infrastructure software to help companies determine cause-and-effect relationships between business events. The financial terms of the deal, which was announced Jan. 23, were undisclosed. AptSoft, based in Burlington, Mass., develops software that falls into the complex event […]

SAN FRANCISCO – Marc Andreessen is probably best known as the co-founder of Mosaic, the first widely-used Web browser, but he’s also the co-founder of Netscape, Loudcloud and now Ning, his latest venture that provides a platform for social networking sites. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, characterizes Andreessen as the person who “practically invented the […]

SAN FRANCISCO-After outlining his company’s concept of exactly what software as a service means to Salesforce.com-a multitenant architecture and subscription-based services-CEO Marc Benioff dazzled the audience of mostly developers at the company’s Tour de Force campaign kickoff Jan. 17 with a dizzying array of statistics. Throughout his keynote address Benioff ticked off Salesforce.com milestones-impressive by […]

SAP has closed its $6.7 billion acquisition of Business Objects, formally folding the company into its Business User unit, which will operate as a separate subsidiary under the SAP umbrella. The group will be led by Business Objects CEO Jonathan Schwarz with the dual mission of carrying on Schwarz’s development work in business intelligence integrating […]

San Francisco-Salesforce.com, at its Jan. 17 Tour de Force event at its hometown headquarters, announced new features to its Force.com developers toolkit and a new pricing model, all designed to increase adoption of the company’s Platform-as-a-Service play called Force.com The company, which has confusing nomenclature to begin with, announced its Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture, which […]

As it turns out Oracle is in fact the best buyer for BEA. After Oracle’s first overtures for BEA in October 2007 — followed by a heated battle between Oracle, BEA and its biggest shareholder Carl Icahn — both companies announced Jan. 16 that they have agreed to merge. Oracle will pay $8.5 billion for […]

SAP released preliminary earnings on Jan. 14 that should give it something to crow about next time Oracle trots out its metrics on how much it is beating SAP at the applications game. The software company, which a year ago missed its fourth-quarter guidance, said in a statement Jan. 14 that total sales were up […]