Larry Barrett

Salesforce.com previewed a major new service initiative it plans to announce at its Dreamforce 2007 conference next week. Force.com is an on-demand application development platform that promises to extend Salesforce’s subscriber base far beyond traditional business software users. It’s not expected for general release until later in 2008. Force.com, which features something the company calls […]

SAN FRANCISCO—More than 10,000 attendees swarmed the VMworld 2007 Conference Wednesday, mixing and mingling among dozens of vendor booths scattered throughout the bowels of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The fact that the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks fell smack dab in the middle of the three-day conclave thankfully appeared to be irrelevant to […]

Cisco Systems on Wednesday said its VFrame Data Center, the software/hardware platform unveiled in July, is now integrated with VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3 software. The announcement, which coincided with CEO John Chambers’ keynote address at the VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco, represents Cisco’s  latest and most comprehensive effort to cash in on the virtualization […]

SAN FRANCISCO — BEA Systems  on Tuesday introduced Genesis, a business application platform that it claims will “mash up” the best elements of service-oriented architecture (SOA) , business process management and social-computing features to give enterprise customers the ability to edit and augment their software systems on the fly. CEO Alfred Chuang told BEAWorld attendees […]

Wyse Technology believes desktop and mobile computing devices can never be too rich or too thin. And one day, according to Chief Marketing Officer Jeff McNaught, they might even be free. On Monday, the San Jose, Calif.-based company used the VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco as the forum to announce the release of its […]

Oracle’s pending lawsuit accusing arch-rival SAP of what amounts to industrial espionage has inadvertently brought both firms’ lucrative and controversial service and maintenance fees to the fore. Both software giants’ attorneys were scheduled to lock antlers Tuesday in a San Francisco federal court but the festivities were postponed after the presiding judge fell ill. Assuming […]

Dell built its business and, until recently, its reputation by keeping things simple. The strategy worked for years with its direct-to-consumer PC model, and now it wants to bring that same cut-and-dried approach to the much more complex and comparatively mysterious world of server virtualization. Dell , along with dozens of hardware, software and virtualization […]

Cognos  made a big splash in the competitive business intelligence software sector Wednesday when it announced it would acquire Applix  for $339 million in cash. Cognos, which competes with the likes of Business Objects , Oracle  and Microsoft  in the $6.25 billion business performance and analytics software market, said the deal is expected to close […]

Virtualization saves time and money, and it even helps save the planet. But in these nascent days of hype and experimentation, the one thing it doesn’t save is the sanity of the IT administrator charged with managing these new and decidedly more complex virtual datacenters, which come and go on a whim. One day a […]

And so that’s that. Palm on Thursday unceremoniously concluded the brief and uninspiring Foleo era when CEO Ed Colligan announced on the company’s blog that it was canceling production of the poorly thought-out mobile device. Described as Palm’s  first “smartphone companion,” Foleo received less-than-enthusiastic reviews after it was introduced in May during the D: All […]

Oracle  closed another significant acquisition over the Labor Day weekend, adding Netsure Telecom, an Irish network intelligence and data integrity software developer, to its ever-expanding, communications-software arsenal. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Netsure becomes the latest addition to Oracle’s Communications Global Business unit which develops communications-specific applications to service providers around the […]

Mike Grandinetti, chief marketing officer at Virtual Iron, admires and respects VMware . Maybe not so much for the quality of its software — though he won’t bad-mouth it — but for the way it’s impressive initial public offering has brought so much attention to the virtualization software market. But Grandinetti said his company isn’t […]