Michael Hickins

The market for enterprise search solutions is exploding, and for good reason. Companies are looking to get a greater bang for their business intelligence bucks, and search engines that can help their employees tap into those myriad resources is one way to do it. Enterprise software vendor SAP , based in Walldorf, German, and Newton […]

Microsoft won’t have Doug Burgum to kick back and forth onto airplanes anymore. Burgum said today he would leave at the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year, in June 2007, instead of taking on the title of chairman of Microsoft’s Business Solutions (MBS) division. Burgum’s replacement will be Satya Nadella, a 14-year veteran who was already […]

SAP  is launching a community site that it hopes will extend its footprint in the enterprise. The new business-process expert community is geared to relatively non-technical users and reflects the growing importance of business process management and business process optimization within enterprises. “This is a community for people who straddle IT and the business units […]

Business integration and optimization company webMethods  is acquiring SOA  registry and governance solutions vendor Infravio for approximately $38 million in cash. The deal, which is expected to close later this month, strengthens webMethods’ SOA offering. SOA is a framework for allowing disparate computer platforms to work together as services  and for creating efficiencies by allowing […]

Microsoft is spreading the word that it might not ship Vista to Europe if regulators don’t cooperate. This after CEO Steve Ballmer issued that same threat to European Commissioner Neelie Kroes during a telephone conversation on Aug. 22. Microsoft is now taking its brinksmanship to the next level by making the substance of that conversation […]

Business intelligence (BI) applications vendor Cognos  announced that it is laying off 6 percent of its workforce. Cognos president and CEO Rob Ashe said the Ottawa-based company is reducing its headcount in order to improve operating margins and to reflect new market conditions. Ashe said the layoffs, which will affect 210 employees, are primarily in […]

SAP  wants companies to think of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) management in strategic terms. The leading vendor of enterprise software, based in Walldorf, Germany, introduced an integrated set of solutions to help enterprises manage their GRC issues. The solutions build on existing SAP solutions, as well as applications that SAP acquired when it purchased […]

Reporter’s Notebook: According to Directions on Microsoft lead analyst Greg DeMichillie, Microsoft has some explaining to do. The company has launched a series of products under the Live umbrella, including e-mail, domain hosting and games. But the products don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. Office Live, for instance, is a domain hosting […]

Dallas-based supply chain management (SCM) solutions vendor i2 Technologies  said it is suing SAP  for patent infringement. SAP and i2 are, respectively, the numbers one and three SCM vendors in terms of revenue. The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleged infringement of seven patents related to […]

Tokyo-based Matsushita Electrical Industrial, parent of Panasonic USA, is offering to replace 6,000 laptop batteries it said may catch fire due to a manufacturing defect. The batteries in question were manufactured between April 2005 and May 2005 and were sold with the CFW4 Let’s Note laptop, a model that is only available in Japan, Panasonic […]

Corporations are more willing to spend bucks on cross-enterprise collaboration than expected, according to a new study published by AMR Research. Spending growth on supply chain management (SCM) solutions will more than double this year, from 3 percent in 2005 to 7 percent this year, according to the report. The total market for SCM solutions […]

Competition from software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors has hit software vendors hard. Spending growth on new enterprise software licenses has slowed to just seven percent in 2006, versus 10 percent in 2005, according to a new report from Forrester Research. This trend is making software vendors get creative, and is leading to new financing options for customers. […]