Applications

Dell is acquiring network-security and data-protection tool provider SonicWall for an estimated $1 billion to $1.5 billion. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions Dell has made in recent months. It has acquired Force 10, Perot Systems and SecureWorks. All of these companies focus on differen...

Leave it to a comic strip, published 18 months ago, to allude to what has become a radical change in how technology is being adopted in the consumer world. Still, very few have recognized how this aspect would fundamentally transform enterprise software. When an ecosystem includes a marketplace or ...

Oracle has announced it is acquiring the cloud-based talent management provider Taleo. It is paying $46 per share, or approximately $1.9 billion, net of Taleo's cash and debt. Taleo's board of directors has unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close mid-year 2012, subject to ...

Oracle is clearly not prepared to let go of the TomorrowNow case involving corporate theft it suffered at the hands of the service provider, which was acquired by rival SAP in 2005. In a legal filing this week, Oracle rejected the $272 million in court-ordered damages from SAP. A jury found in favor...

IBM continues to carve out its own stake in the social enterprise app space -- a market forecast by Forrester Research to grow 61 percent each year to reach $6.4 billion by 2016 -- with the beta rollout of the next release of its enterprise social networking platform, IBM Connections. The beta, whic...

Oracle has released its Big Data Appliance, which it announced last year at Oracle OpenWorld. With no release date promised, the industry was surprised by its relative speed to market. Less surprising was Oracle's enlistment of Cloudera -- the leading provider of Hadoop system management tools -- to...

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer delivered his final Consumer Electronics Show keynote in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Ballmer talked up Windows 8 and discussed additions to the Xbox platform and new Windows-based Nokia devices. The presentation, which featured "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest, kicked off the a...

Gartner has released its global IT spending projections for 2012: It is forecasting a 3.7 percent increase from 2011 to $3.8 trillion. This forecast is a downward revision from its earlier 2012 outlook of 4.6 percent growth. Last year, IT spending clocked in at $3.7 trillion, which was up 6.9 percen...

Let's be frank: The main reason Oracle's latest quarterly revenues nosedived was backlash from users fed up with two years of price hikes on products, technical support, maintenance and licensing contracts -- and not because of a correction in the overall server hardware market. Yes, it's true that ...

If it's late November or early December, I'm usually traveling to or from Westchester County, New York, home of IBM and its Software Group and Systems and Technology Group's annual IT analyst confabs. In practical ways, these events tend to mirror one another; past strategies and solutions are trott...

Microsoft's star witness, the company's chairman and former CEO Bill Gates, took the stand in a long-brewing antitrust civil lawsuit that pits Redmond against software maker Novell. The suit is based on an oft-repeated accusation against Microsoft: that it abused its dominant position in the market ...

The board was re-elected, company executives were questioned about corporate strategy, a proposal to create a sustainability committee was killed. All in all, it was business as usual at Microsoft's annual shareholders' meeting Tuesday, except for some uncomfortable talk -- uncomfortable from Micros...

Microsoft beat sales estimates Thursday when it announced record-setting revenue levels in its fiscal first quarter, thanks in part to strong sales in the cloud-based business operations, which overcame slow growth in the PC and mobile markets. The software giant posted net income of $5.74 billion a...

The Novell v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit entered its trial phase in the Utah U.S. District Court this week, with jury selection taking place on Monday. The case, which Novell originally filed in 2004, has traveled a long and winding road. Novell won the right to go forward with the trial in May 201...

Recent corporate shake-ups at Yahoo and anonymous insider reports to various media outlets added fuel to the fiery rumors that Microsoft is eyeing an acquisition of the search engine. Though Microsoft reportedly denied assertions that it was looking into buying Yahoo, the search engine's stock value...