Richard Adhikari

My old pal Bob Dylan never spoke a truer phrase than when he said the times they are a-changing. Not a million years ago, the concept of software as a service began taking off; then Salesforce.com launched the platform as a service concept with its Force.com application development platform. And now we have testing as […]

Salesforce.com on Wednesday reported net income of close to $10 million in its second fiscal quarter 2008 ending July 31, more than double the 2007 quarter’s figure of about $3.7 million. Total revenues were $263 million, up 6 percent quarter over quarter, and 49 percent year over year. The company is projecting revenue for the […]

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) has bought multi-channel knowledge applications vendor InStranet for $31.5 million in a bid to add more service to the provider’s suite of software-as-a service products. The deal, announced late Tuesday, enables Salesforce.com to put improved service and support features in the hands of customers. InStranet specializes in knowledge base applications. This is […]

There are no permanent enemies in politics, just permanent interests, the truism goes; and this is apparently true in business as well. InternetNews.com has learned that VMware has joined arch-rival Microsoft’s third-party server virtualization validation program (SVVP). “VMware is proud to be a part of SVVP,” Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president of worldwide field operations, […]

Raritan Helps Manage Virtual/Physical Data Center Equipment Virtualizing the data center to consolidate servers and reduce costs has been top of mind for a while, and the big boys — HP, IBM and CA — have added virtual machine (VM) management capabilities to their data center management tools. Which is as it should be; their […]

In the wake of heavily publicized breaches such as the one at TJX that are reported to have been the result of inadequate wireless transmission security, the credit card industry has broadened its security standards. The PCI Security Standards Council, which governs the standard, yesterday unveiled version 1.2 of PCI Data Security Standards, or PCI-DSS […]

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new versions of two products in its InfoSphere portfolio at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) world conference in San Diego. The new products add capabilities to InfoSphere Information Server that let it sort and match names and addresses in languages other than English and from other cultures worldwide. This will […]

In a move that heralds an aggressive broadening of its business strategies, McAfee (NYSE:MFE), which has offered data leak protection (DLP) technology since 2006, will push even deeper into that area following its purchase of Reconnex. McAfee, which paid $46 million in cash for Reconnex, plans to use that company’s technology to simplify and automate […]

Sometimes it pays to wait a few weeks. VMware introduced Update 2 for both its ESX 3.5 hypervisor and ESXi 3.5 free hypervisor at the end of July with much fanfare. Then, at midnight on August 12, both went awry. A piece of code in the hypervisor expired the products, which meant that users could […]

Fortune 500 companies abandon more than one-third of software-development projects after implementation because they don’t meet user needs, according to a study released today by analyst firm Voke Media. The survey was conducted from April through July. That sees a lot of money squandered — the average project costs $3.2 million and requires almost 1,300 […]

In the wake of news that a Wells Fargo bank access code had been used to steal thousands of consumers’ personal information, the bank has launched a full-scale investigation into the crime. The code was used to access information from MicroBilt, which describes itself as the “single source industry leader in risk management information” and […]

SAP is betting that enterprises will be struggling to cope with Standard & Poor’s (S&P) new ratings criteria and is introducing a new offering designed to help them address S&P’s enterprise risk management (ERM) evaluations. The evaluations, which will begin in the third quarter, will target non-financial companies, S&P said. They will focus on risk […]