Larry Barrett

SAP on Tuesday announced it had made a multimillion-dollar investment in Nakisa, a Canadian developer of software applications used to visualize employee depth charts and develop succession-planning strategies. In addition to the cold, hard cash, SAP also inked a global reseller agreement to sell Nakisa’s OrgManagement and SuccessionPlanning applications (renamed as SAP’s Talent Visualization by […]

VMware on Tuesday released its Virtual Infrastructure 3 software with several new features it says will make life much easier for datacenters managers. Virtual Infrastructure 3 consists of the VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 modules. According to Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s senior director of product marketing, its latest iteration takes virtualization to the next […]

Oracle opened up its pocketbook again today, this time to snap up Dutch software firm Moniforce for an undisclosed price. Moniforce’s webStress and webProbe software lets companies monitor and evaluate the performance and availability of their Web applications by tracking a company’s total network traffic. Oracle officials said Moniforce’s applications will help round out its […]

It appears it’s now just a matter of time before TomorrowNow, the third-party software service and support firm at the center of so much controversy between software giants SAP and Oracle is sold to another third-party support provider. Last week, SAP announced that TomorrowNow CEO Andrew Nelson and a handful of senior executives at the […]

IBM on Thursday announced “Blue Cloud,” a combination of software and hardware components that will let enterprise customers experiment with the “cloud” computing model that’s largely responsible for the growth and popularity of Web 2.0 heavyweights Google and Amazon.com. Dennis Quan, CTO of High Performance on Demand Solutions for IBM’s software group, said Blue Cloud […]

IBM has been running us media types ragged of late with release after release announcing big plans for unified communications, mashup application platforms and its third-quarter earnings report. That’s all well and good, but none of this “news” address a much bigger issue. IBM, like so many of its competitors already have, needs to adapt […]

SAN JOSE, Calif.—It should come as no surprise that Cisco Systems and Adobe Systems, two companies that enjoyed spectacular growth establishing them as tech blue-chips during the nascent Internet, are also among the first companies to embrace the software-as-a-service model (SaaS) (define) as the vehicle of choice for the Internet’s next evolutionary phase. On Thursday, […]

Autonomic computing doesn’t have the same buzz these days as virtualization or, say, service-oriented-architecture (SOA) (define), but that’s not stopping IBM from moving forward with its latest line of software and services designed for companies to create self-managing computing networks. IBM, which launched its autonomic computing initiative in 2001 and remains—with few exceptions—the lone champion […]

It will officially go down as acquisition No. 125 in Cisco Systems’ storied, 23-year history, but Thursday’s proposed purchase of security software vendor Securent tells the enterprise software world a lot more about where the company is headed than where it’s been. Cisco remains the world’s largest and most important network-equipment vendor. But its recent […]

Verio this week launched what it’s calling its Business Solutions suite, a fairly basic package of on-demand business applications geared for the small- and mid-sized business (SMB) crowd. Microsoft Exchange 2007, McAfee Total Protection, SugarCRM Professional edition, Accrisoft’s business management and productivity suite—which includes Intuit’s QuickBooks Pro—and an online PC data backup service will now […]