Dan Orzech

It was less than a year ago that Larry Ellison informed Oracle users that the company’s 11i application suite would provide all the functionality they needed to run their businesses, without custom programming to add special features or tie in products from other software vendors. Now, however, the brash CEO of the world’s second-largest software […]

While Germany-based software company SAP is eager to trumpet its support for running business applications on Linux operating system (see Part 1), the other big player in the enterprise resource planning market, Oracle Corp., of Silicon Valley, seems more ambivalent about the open source movement. SAP released its first Linux version of its primary ERP […]

BJ Havlik is not afraid of being on the bleeding edge. Two months ago, Havlik, the IT manager of Menasha Corp., a $1 billion packaging and forest products company in Neenah, Wisc., swapped his company’s SAP applications from Hewlett-Packard servers using a Unix operating system and onto Dell servers running Linux. Havlik’s motivation was simple: […]

Going “vanilla” with your ERP software isn’t a one-scoop deal. Besides getting their initial installs up and running faster, companies are finding that new software upgrades with greater functionality are allowing them to replace some custom code with off-the-shelf software that their ERP vendor, not their in-house IT staff, will support. As commercial ERP packages […]

Waste Management Inc. has no intention of letting its name be dragged through the dirt by its new ERP system. The $12 billion, Houston-based firm — the largest solid-waste management company in the U.S.–recently began a $100-plus million installation of financial and human resources software from PeopleSoft Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif. It is determined, says […]

Executives at General Motors Corp. didn’t set out to go into the media business. They just wanted to gain some control over their massive archives, which contain images of every car the company ever has produced–going back practically to the turn of the 20th century. Stored away somewhere, the world’s largest automaker has about 2,000 […]

There’s good news for techies with Open Source skills: you’re wanted by employers everywhere. Three months ago, we started tracking the market for Open Source jobs, using EarthWeb’s DICE.com job service. That gives us a pretty good idea of what employers are looking for, since DICE is one the largest online listings of information technology […]

Technical support for Linux, by and large, consisted of posting a query in one of the online Linux newsgroups. As more people begin using Linux for critical applications in the business world, however, that is beginning to change. Companies such as Red Hat and LinuxCare have jumped into the Linux support business, offering support packages […]

For decades, computer companies have made lots of money selling big computers. The equation was simple: if you wanted big iron, you had to pay big bucks. That rule is no longer true. Now you can build your own supercomputer, using commodity components, for a fraction of the cost of a Cray, IBM SP2, or […]

How do you move 110 terabytes of data onto the Web? That’s the challenge facing General Motors Corp. as it tries to bring its enormous investment in existing IT systems into the age of the Internet. GM–the world’s largest corporation–has more than 8,500 applications, many of them running on mainframes. With Web browsers rapidly becoming […]