Michael Hickins

Oracle  is shoring up its midsection. The software maker used its Oracle OpenWorld customer conference in San Francisco today to reaffirm and shore up its Fusion middleware strategy for integrating its disparate application sets and infrastructure software. Oracle led off its raft of announcements with a bid to acquire operations support system vendor MetaSolv  for […]

Now that Google  has blown out analyst expectations with a sterling quarter, it can’t possibly do it again, can it? The unrivaled search giant reported 70 percent revenue growth versus the previous year’s third quarter, to $2.69 billion, and 48 percent earnings growth, to $733 million. Mind you, this rise took place during the summer […]

Converts — ex-smokers and former on-premise software vendors — are the most zealous of proselytizers, which is one reason internetnews.com wanted to talk to Chris Cabrera about two topics he is intimately familiar: the rise of on-demand applications and sales compensation. Cabrera, CEO of on-demand compensation application vendor Xactly, is well-placed to talk about both […]

Google  reported revenues of $2.69 billion for the third quarter ending September 30, 2006, an increase of 70 percent over Q3 2005, and 10 percent higher than Q2 2006. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also posted net earnings of $812.3 million. Net margins, at 38.3 percent, were almost a full point higher than the 37.6 […]

SAP’s got an eye on its developers. The company said today at its TechEd conference in Amsterdam that it will lower the price of its developer user license. It did not disclose the exact size of the price break. Previously, developers could only gain access to the platform by doing business with a SAP customer or […]

UPDATED: Microsoft  wants a place in the virtualization conversation. Currently an also-ran in a sector dominated by VMware and other open source vendors, Microsoft is striving to attract developers to its side by opening up its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) Image Format specification. The VHD image format gives server administrators a snapshot of what systems […]

Private investment firms The Carlyle Group and Providence Equity Partners will acquire Open Solutions for $1.3 billion pending shareholder approval. But if recent trends are any indication, the company will not stay private for very long. Shareholders of the identity management solutions vendor are due to receive $38 per share under terms of the agreement, […]

Microsoft thinks it has changed Vista sufficiently to satisfy European and Korean regulators. The company said that it would be releasing the Vista operating system in Europe and Korea on schedule, following what it called “constructive dialogue” with the European Commission and the Korea Fair Trade Commission. The changes to Vista made to assuage the […]

IBM  has delivered a bi-directional speech-to-speech translation system for U.S. forces to use in Iraq. The ramifications of this are obvious: improving communication between U.S. armed forces and Iraqi civilians and military personnel will save lives on both sides. IBM has loaded the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR) onto Panasonic Toughbook laptops used by the […]

SAP  may be feeling the heat. The world’s largest vendor of ERP  software was quick to deprecate Apex, the new programming environment announced by Salesforce.com  this week. Apex is a Java-like programming environment that will allow developers to customize applications running on the Salesforce.com platform, according to its own specifications. This innovation addresses one of […]

Executives can pocket load Lotus Notes software, data and personal files onto a USB-compatible device such as a flash drive or iPod using features of the 7.0.2 release of IBM’s Lotus Notes and Domino, just released. The solution will also allow users to create blogs from within their Lotus applications and to create RSS feeds […]

Video search site Blinkx.com wants to encourage its early-adopter audience to become Internet couch potatoes. The company is rolling out a set of features to make its site behave more like television. One new feature allows users to pick a channel, such as news or music, and watch previews of the most recent videos to […]