Michael Hickins

Analysis: The lawsuit that Oracle (Quote) filed against its rival in the enterprise software market yesterday is going to get even worse. When all is said and done, SAP’s (Quote) conduct, if proved true, could cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, untold points of market share and even, perhaps, jail time for some executives. […]

Cell phones have evolved from being simple voice transmitters to productivity tools and entertainment devices. Now, as several new services illustrate, they are poised to replace international wire transfers and banks cards as well. U.K. based mobile communications carrier Vodaphone (Quote) is launching M-PESA, a new service that allows Kenyans to send money to family members […]

Facing challenges from free business services offered by Google (Quote) and, to a lesser extent, online office tools maker Zoho, Microsoft (Quote) is adding more goodies to its menu of offerings to small business owners. The Redmond, Wash,-based software vendor is striking deals with leading chain retailers in order to build a more personalized approach to landing […]

As part of the spring 2007 release of its flagship Salesforce Automation (SFA) customer relationship management application, Salesforce.com (Quote) is rolling out what it calls “an enterprise-quality MySpace” application. AppSpace, which allows businesses to create customer-facing portals on demand, will be available in limited release beginning in April. The software, the latest in Salesforce.com’s rapid software-as-a-service […]

Walldorf, Germany-based enterprise software vendor SAP (Quote) stuck close to its supply-chain roots today and announced a series of products to help companies track and authenticate their products. The company introduced a product tracking and authentication (PTA) application and object event repository (OER) that companies can use to aggregate data from RFID or other electronic tagging […]

Business intelligence relies on clean data and a single version of the truth. On-demand sales compensation management software vendor Xactly believes that kind of valuable information can be extrapolated from sales data. The company has thus turned to new partners, including business intelligence software vendor Cognos (Quote) and enterprise data integration specialist Informatica (Quote), to roll […]

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) ship has sailed with a boatload of customers, while many traditional vendors of on-premise software have been left behind. According to Gartner, the market for SaaS applications grew by 26 percent last year, from $5 billion in 2005 to $6.3 billion in 2006. The consulting firm expects demand for SaaS to continue […]

The open source software vendor has produced a translator, available for download on its site, that allows users of OpenOffice, Novell’s version of ODF, to read and edit documents produced using Microsoft Word 2007. ODF is the OpenDocument format, which is supported by OpenOffice.org, and Open XML is the default file format for Microsoft Office […]

The consumerization of the enterprise is in full swing. What began in 2006 as a trickle of consumer-oriented web applications like podcasts and gadgets making their way into the enterprise, has today become a veritable torrent. In what may be the signature moment of this consumer-enterprise mashup (define) in 2007, IBM (Quote) announced a deal with Google […]

REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft (Quote) CEO Steve Ballmer tried to temper expectations for enterprise sales of Vista last week, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t trying to push its new operating system (OS) all the same. The software giant today introduced a set of tools intended to help IT administrators sniff out compatibility problems between […]