Michael Hickins

Reporter’s Notebook: I attended a technology industry conference not too long ago and watched a group of executives from software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors patting each other on the back and taking pot shots at their on-premise rivals. It was eerily reminiscent of the early dot-com days. That was when e-commerce upstarts, conspicuous in their casual business […]

Salesforce.com surprised analysts with a much stronger second quarter than expected. As impressive as the raw numbers, however, was the manner in which the leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) software is diversifying its revenue streams. The company reported second quarter income of $118 million, a 64 percent improvement over last year’s Q2. Pro […]

Bill Gates is more Daddy Warbucks than Little Orphan Annie, but his new mantra might well be “The sun will come out tomorrow.” The software-spending picture for the rest of 2006 is considerably brighter than it was three months ago, and Microsoft has the most reason to be pleased, according to results of a quarterly […]

This time, at least CA  didn’t have to postpone its earnings call. The management software and services vendor, which has struggled with a raft of executive defections, earnings restatements and criminal charges levied against senior managers, announced that profits fell 64 percent during the first quarter of fiscal 2007. The company also announced that it […]

Oracle  may be getting into the anti-terror business. The company is contributing $125 million in capital to help subsidiary i-flex Solutions finance the acquisition of Mantas, an anti-money laundering and compliance solutions company based in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Herndon, Va. I-flex, based in Mumbai, India, said it will use $122 million of those […]

The Department of Justice has filed new securities-related fraud charges against former Brocade officials already under indictment for violating securities laws. The new indictment against former Brocade CEO Gregory Reyes, and Stephanie Jensen, the former vice president of human resources, includes four counts of making false statements to accountants, three counts of making false SEC […]

Analysis: IBM’s acquisition of rival enterprise content management (ECM) vendor FileNet  will complement its already impressive array of tools, say analysts. If the deal goes through, it will also send Big Blue back to the top of the ECM heap. And quite a heap that is. According to research firm IDC, content management is already […]

Employease has been offering on-demand human resources software since before anyone had uttered the words software-as-a-service (SaaS) . So it’s fitting that the ten-year-old company should now be at the vanguard of another step in the evolution of a software delivery mechanism for which it was one of the pioneers. Employease co-founder Mike Seckler told internetnews.com […]

UPDATED: IBM  today agreed to purchase rival FileNet  for $1.6 billion in cash, a deal that will further shrink the number of players in the enterprise content management (ECM) space. FileNet is one of the top remaining standalone ECM vendors in a market that includes giants IBM and EMC, as well as fellow standalones Interwoven […]

Novell  is making life easier for IT security administrators. The enterprise software vendor has integrated the Sentinel security and event management software from e-Security, which it acquired in April, with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and identity management suite. Called Sentinel from Novell, the software scans information and events in firewalls, routers, intrusion detection systems, […]

Citrix  agreed to purchase Orbital Data Corp., which makes appliances and software that speed the delivery of applications over wide area networks (WANs), for $50 million in cash. Orbital Data makes WAN acceleration appliances, which eliminate the need for any changes to current network management tools, firewalls, network services or applications. The machines support up […]

Incorporating data obtained from observing user behavior can significantly improve the ordering of search engine top results. So-called “noisy behavior” — information on where users click, how long they stay on sites and whether and how they reformulate their queries — can improve search results by 31 percent, according to a new study from Microsoft […]