Erin Joyce

UPDATED Salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM customers have upgraded to the enterprise edition 2.0 of its CRM software. This is one reason that the service of Internet-delivered software is accelerating the commoditization of traditional enterprise software, said CEO Marc Benioff Wednesday. The enterprise edition 2.0 upgrade for customers, which is delivered ASP-style , includes salesforce.com’s sforce 4.0, […]

Microsoft moved to bestow more cash on investors as part of a plan to share about $75 billion with shareholders over the next four years. The company announced a quarterly dividend of 8 cents per share, which doubles its annual dividend, and unveiled plans to buy back up to $30 billion of its own stock […]

Helped by surging hardware sales and its own enterprise investments, IBM’s profits jumped by 17 percent in the second quarter. The results were reasonable enough for IBM to remain on track with analysts and its own full-year expectations, after it largely met or exceeded analysts’ expectations for the quarter. IBM said it expects to see […]

Australian communications provider Telstra is helping the Hyatt hotel chain throw over its legacy, point-to-point networking system in favor of a mesh topology. The hotel chain tapped Telstra for an $8.4 million outsourcing deal that includes an MPLS-based (multiprotocol label switching) managed service platform. Hyatt plans to move hosting of its the application service providers […]

UPDATED: Shares of Red Hat went for a rough ride Tuesday after the number one Linux distributor announced it would restate three years of financial results and start recognizing revenue from subscriptions on a daily rather than monthly basis. The company’s stock price tumbled after the announcement, closing down 22 percent at $15.73. In after […]

Verizon Wireless has extended its ongoing contract with Lucent Technologies by another $4.5 billion to help the carrier continue building out its 3G data network. Lucent already has an existing contract for about $525 million worth of work, which includes Lucent’s hardware, software and services for Verizon’s 3G network, which is based on CDMA2000 1xEV-DO […]

You can stop staring at the ceiling each night, wondering. A new study has confirmed what many a cubicle dweller has long suspected: Many companies, maybe even yours, are monitoring outgoing e-mails. According to a new survey conducted by Forrester Consulting and sponsored by Proofpoint Inc., a company that makes anti-spam and filtering software, more […]

Independent software vendors (ISVs) are the lifeblood of the world’s largest software company, and Microsoft is making sure it stays that way with a number of new initiatives, including a 50 percent cut on royalty rates on embedded programs. During a kickoff event at its Partnerworld Conference, taking place in Toronto this week, Microsoft unveiled […]

Capital spending is still looking strong for semiconductors in 2004, according to the latest forecasts from Gartner . The research firm said that at the mid-point of 2004, worldwide semiconductor capital spending is on pace to reach $44.8 billion this year, up by close to 51 percent from the same time last year. Overall, capital […]

The semiconductor industry is hailing a trade deal between the United States and China ending China’s tax policy that effectively priced U.S. exporters of integrated circuits out of China’s $19 billion integrated circuit market. The deal, which U.S. and Chinese trade officials announced Thursday, would end China’s policy of giving rebates to domestic producers of […]

UPDATED: Western Europe holds the dubious honor as the worst region for software piracy on the planet in dollar terms, accounting for about $9.6 billion in annual losses to the industry in 2003, according to a new study. All told, pirated software is in use on about 36 percent of all computers around the globe, […]

Semiconductor player Micron Technology is jumping into the NAND Flash memory market for memory cards, USB devices and other mass storage applications. The company expects its first NAND product, a 2Gb component, to hit the market by year’s end. Officials said with the Flash card market starting to transition from 128MB to 256MB density, and […]