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Software maintenance will reach US$137 billion by 2010, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent, according to IDC. Today, many vendors including Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM, among others, are stepping up their efforts to identify noncompliance, making an audit a real possibility Aligning a company's IT needs with its business object...

MuleSource, a provider of open source service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure software, has jumped into the SOA governance pool with the community release this week ofMule Galaxy 1.0 Galaxy, an open source platform with integrated registry and repository, allows users to store and manage an increasing number of SOA artifacts, and can be ...

A new technology using silicon nanowires boosts the ability of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to store a charge by as much as a factor of 10, according to research conducted at Stanford University. The findings are published in the December 2007 issue of Nature Nanotechnology The technology could significantly extend the running time of battery...

Yahoo, with its 248 million active registered users worldwide, has announced that all of them will be able to use their Yahoo IDs as an OpenID to let them eliminate separate IDs and logins at Web sites that support the open, decentralized digital identity framework "What Yahoo has announced today is the ability for people with accounts on Yahoo and...

Putting its money where its mouth is -- and where its corporate parent's future may lie as well -- Google's charitable arm, Google.org, on Thursday announced US$25 million worth of new grants across what it now says are the five core areas that it will focus on going forward Google.org will concentrate its monetary giving and related work in the fi...

Computer manufacturers had cause for good cheer in the fourth quarter of 2007 with PC shipments increasing a little more than 15 percent worldwide and nearly 9 percent in the U.S., according toIDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report However, the pending recession in the U.S. could led to slower growth in the next few years, the research firm pr...

In a move with potentially far-reaching implications for Web users and Internet companies alike, Time Warner Cable will test a new model for high-speed Internet access that charges users based on how much bandwidth they consume Time Warner Cable will try out the metered approach to selling high-speed Internet access through its Road Runner cable br...

In the wake of several incidents in which batteries in AT&T U-verse network cabinets exploded or caught fire, AT&T is replacing 17,000 of the batteries in its streetside devices, the company confirmed Thursday The batteries were manufactured by Avestor, a Canadian company based in Quebec that closed its doors in late 2006....

Salesforce.com has introduced a set of new tools with a pricing model designed to encourage adoption of its Force.com Platform as a Service product introduced last year One of the new entries is Force.com Cloud Computing architecture, which can be purchased on a per-login basis. "Cloud computing" refers to the distributed computing model in which m...

The e-commerce market is entering a new period. After an initial phase during which companies focused largely on making their products and services available to potential customers via the Web, users are now trying to take a more comprehensive look at their deployments, one that correlates each sale to their entire operation Consequently, a new bre...

On Feb. 16, BizAutomation.com is planning a launch of an on-demand business suite that will include e-commerce, CRM, accounting and other back- and front-office features. There are other similar products on the market -- namely NetSuite -- but none, insists CEO Carl Zaldivar, that are geared specifically to the small and medium-sized business (SMB)...

Part 1 of this two-part feature looks at how virtual worlds such as Second Life are making an impact on how companies conduct employee recruiting and workforce management activities. According to an ever-growing group of experts and companies in the employment business, that impact has the potential to be profound and far-reaching Not everyone, tho...

In the beginning, man adapted to the environment; shortly thereafter, the environment adapted to man. Al Gore's "inconvenient truth" is fast becoming an uncomfortable reality, and the race is on to find new ways to cope before nature hands us the ultimate eviction notice However, are the super-cities and hyperstructures under consideration today re...

Extol International, a business-to-business integration provider, has introduced a middleware application aimed at the upper midmarket. Business Extenders, a subset of its main product line, Extol Business Integrator, is designed to address a one-off pain point in the IT environment Such one-off integration glitches, to cite a few examples, could b...

Hackers are targeting users of some older versions of Microsoft Excel with a zero-day exploit that could compromise their data, according to a security advisory Microsoft issued Tuesday The vulnerability is in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, along with Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Exc...

Sun Microsystems has announced plans to acquireSQL, maker of the popular MySQL database system, for US$1 billion Sun -- long a proponent and developer of open source systems -- agreed to pay $800 million in cash and assume liability for $200 million in stock options. The deal likely won't be completed until the end of the fiscal year. During the tr...

Just a day after IBM soothed investors with a solid quarter, fellow tech bellwether Intel raised fresh questions about the strength of the sector by missing its fourth quarter targets and issuing a softer-than-expected outlook The dominant chipmaker managed to post a 51 percent profit increase for the fourth quarter to US$2.3 billion, but still fel...

Three months after BEA Systems rejected its first unsolicited offer of US$6.7 billion, Oracle announced that it will be acquiring the middleware and business process management vendor after all -- for $8.5 billion, or $19.38 per share. That's a 14 percent premium over its first bid and a 24 percent premium over BEA's closing share price of $15.58 B...

The growth of e-commerce and the continuing expansion of outsourcing and the remote workforce are fueling a new approach to paying for services. Internet-focused companies are replacing traditional online payment transactions with prepaid debit cards Payoneer is a startup firm that is pushing this concept of prepaid debit cards to leverage more Web...

I am still trying to figure out what the primaries are telling us about social networking. I think some of this will be important for CRM and as I have noodled on what it all means, I have been surprised myself. Before I go on, this is not a discussion of who won or my candidate preferences, just musings on how it went down First, I think there is ...