Michael Hickins

Cognos is testing a wireless version of its entire suite of business intelligence reports. If all goes well with beta testing this month, the solution will be available for users of BlackBerry devices from Research in Motion (Quote, Chart) in the first half of 2007. The solution will allow executives to view and interact with […]

NEW YORK — IBM (Quote, Chart) is looking to recuperate in real-time collaboration what it has lost in asynchronous workplace tools. The Armonk, N.Y.-based software and services vendor today announced that real-time collaboration platform Sametime 7.5 is available. Sametime 7.5 features secure enterprise chat, Web conferencing and document-sharing capabilities. Customers will also be able to drag […]

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 attire, banded […]

Business intelligence (BI) applications vendor Cognos (Quote, Chart) 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 […]

SAP (Quote, Chart) 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 […]

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. […]

Pioneering vendors of software-as-a-service (SaaS) have spent the better part of a decade defending their model against purveyors of traditional on-premise software. They have made their point, perhaps to their own chagrin. As the market for SaaS has opened up to enterprise-class customers and beyond customer relationship management (CRM) to a fuller array of solutions, […]

On the face of it, IBM’s (Quote, Chart)$1.3 billion acquisition of ISS (Quote, Chart)makes perfect sense. But deeper looks at ISS’s product lines and IBM’s customer base have some analysts questioning how well the entire company will fit into Big Blue’s own lines of business. IBM has long considered itself a major player in the […]

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 (Quote, Chart) has the most reason to be pleased, according to results of […]