Applications

Software maintenance will reach $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. Align...

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. Consequently, a new breed of ...

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 ...

Just months after it decided to stop its legal battles against the landmark EU antitrust finding, Microsoft now finds itself facing new inquiries into claims that the software giant abused its market dominance. The European Commission is looking into accusations that Microsoft used its power in the ...

IBM posted strong fourth quarter results Monday, beating profits and sales targets as it rode to the rescue of a sagging stock market by providing renewed optimism about technology earnings. Big Blue's profit rose 24 percent to $2.80 per share in the fourth quarter of 2007 while revenue increased 10...

Ever notice that Microsoft -- with cash to burn, apparently -- waits for the obvious to become inevitable and then ends up paying huge premiums for companies in order to catch up to reality? We saw it with aQuantive, Softricity and Groove Networks. It's happened again with Tuesday's $1.2 billion bid...

Understanding the business and technical reality of your software assets is imperative in order to align them with corporate priorities. The ability to predict a body's responses to environmental triggers can have significant therapeutic benefits. A researcher could analyze the "compliance" of your...

Bidding to reshape its image, Xerox is launching a major rebranding effort meant to encourage business customers to think of it as an innovation company, not just a leading maker of copiers. The new image is meant to reflect the needs of today's business and to be "a bit less formal, a lot more live...

Some recent Iona Technologies announcements point up the growing practice of multiple ESBs within enterprises, often associated in a federated manner, and sometimes using ESBs tasked with specific types of integration duties. Iona is taking a "hybrid" approach to ESB offerings, with a coordinated op...

IBM has teamed with ACI Worldwide, an electronic payment software company, to develop a payment system powered by IBM's open standards based System Z platform. The new offering will include IBM's DB2 database, WebSphere middleware and Tivoli management software as well as its Crypto-chip technology...

A Silicon Valley startup with an unlikely name announced Monday a new platform designed to enable telephony in a wide variety of applications. Using an open platform to facilitate connections between telephony and the Web, Ribbit is working with a community of more than 600 developers to help voice-...

China-based software company CDC raked in the most revenue for a third quarter of its history but nevertheless suffered a net loss of more than US$7 million, a situation blamed in part on "pirate" servers allowing people to play its online game Yulgang without authorization. The Q3 report by CDC, wh...

Possibly causing worldwide feelings of deja vu, Opera Software has filed a complaint with the European Commission that says the bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system amounts to unfair monopolization. Opera, based in Norway, developed and distributes the Opera Web browser. I...

As enterprises rush to assess how they can benefit from service-oriented architecture, many naturally but mistakenly focus on the technological aspects of the solution. As an architecture, it's unfair to paint SOA as a panacea to independent software vendors' most daunting business problems. In orde...

A range of factors will drive down software licensing costs in coming years, benefiting enterprises but creating a challenge for leading application vendors to keep profits rising, according to a new report. Information technology departments will seek ways to reduce what they spend on software, dup...