Business

PeopleSoft has amended its spate of lawsuits against would-be buyer Oracle to include new charges that Oracle deliberately interfered with its customer relationships. The move comes amid increasing doubt that Oracle can overcome two significant obstacles to its proposed takeover of PeopleSoft: regul...

E-mail marketing remains one of the most cost-effective ways to deliver long-term profitability for the online channel, but its existence could be at risk if the flood of spam is not brought under control, according to executives at the eTail2003 conference in Boston, where E-Commerce Times reporter...

The e-commerce landscape may have changed dramatically in recent years, but both pure-play e-tailers and multichannel retailers are still focused on finding ways to convert more surfers to buyers, according to keynote addresses and interviews at the eTail2003 conference, where E-Commerce Times repor...

As the latest, most compact iteration of server technology, blade servers are becoming increasingly popular. Although blades currently represent just 1 or 2 percent of total server market share, IDC analyst Mark Melenovsky said he believes they will capture 20 percent or more of server unit sales by...

Broadband adoption is increasing steadily in the United States, but significant hurdles are keeping growth rates lower than they could be. Most rural areas and some suburban areas cannot get broadband, making the service predominantly a city-based one. In fact, the United States is outpaced by sever...

Marking the end of an overseas battle between Internet heavyweights, Yahoo has announced plans to shutter its Australian auction site and direct users to rival eBay. The company said it will close the site, known as Sold.com, later this month. The move comes almost exactly a year after eBay invested...

The ability to change prices in the blink of an eye, instantly responding to market fluctuations, seems as if it would be an attractive tactic to online retailers. However, so-called dynamic pricing has not caught on yet in the e-commerce world. As Forrester analyst Noha Tohamy told the E-Commerce T...

SCO has announced that it will sell intellectual property licenses to make it legal for enterprises to run Linux, which allegedly uses portions of SCO's proprietary Unix source code. The company is offering an introductory license price of $699 per CPU until October 15, 2003, after which the price p...

Leading Linux vendor Red Hat has filed suit against The SCO Group, aiming to prove that Red Hat software does not infringe on SCO patents and to stop SCO from making what it called "untrue" statements. The company also announced plans to establish a $1 million legal defense fund to help smaller firm...

In an effort to trim costs, U.S. companies increasingly have been shipping work overseas, especially to India, China, Eastern Europe and South America. While this practice boosts the bottom line in the accounting office, it also raises the anxiety level of U.S.-based employees. However, not all IT j...

Microsoft has revealed portions of its Windows source code to a dozen foreign governments as part of its Government Security Program Initiative, Microsoft spokesperson Alex Mercer told the E-Commerce Times. The initiative allows controlled access to the code so that foreign governments and organizat...

Gorging on enterprise infrastructure was de rigueur in the go-go 1990s, but a drop in capital spending has heralded the arrival of new methods of building out networks in small increments. In the storage networking arena, budget-conscious CIOs are focusing on such cost-cutting measures as utility co...

IBM has become the latest computer services giant to score a billion-dollar outsourcing deal, signing a 10-year, $1.1 billion agreement to handle the computer infrastructure needs of Switzerland-based power-services company ABB. In the race to ink high-profile services deals, this is just the latest...

Recently, a new value-added tax (VAT) law was enacted to level the playing field between Europe-based and U.S.-based companies in the European e-commerce market. Previously, U.S. e-commerce companies doing business in Europe had not been required to charge value-added tax, putting their European cou...

Macromedia Flash technology garnered a shaky reputation at the height of dot-com mania in the 1990s, when it was often associated with Web site splash pages that effectively barred users from accessing a site's useful content. But things have changed: Flash is now a nearly ubiquitous environment for...