Allison Taylor

Contrary to what many people might think, more Canadian companies in the software arena have acquired foreign companies than foreign companies acquired Canadian, according to one industry insider.

More than 450 software developers, engineers and architects from around the globe gathered in Toronto this month to get hands on with Visual Studio programming at the Visual Studio Developers Conference held at the Toronto Congress Centre.

Sun Microsystems Inc. continues to place its focus on appealing to the developer community with a recent upgrade to its Java Web Services Development Pack 1.4, available online. The company also announced a new edition of the Sun Java System Application Server 7 for its Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), which is available as a free download.

New and emerging software companies in Canada are feeling positive about their prospects for growth

The next iteration of Microsoft Corp.'s Great Plains enterprise resource planning (ERP) software will include over 120 product enhancements focused primarily around manufacturing, distribution and project accounting capabilities, marking the company's biggest ERP development effort.

The University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto announced on Monday that it is extending its IT outsourcing contract with Hewlett-Packard Canada to focus more on its core competencies. The six-year, $18-million contract will now include, among other things, support for UHN's data centre.

Before Bombardier Aerospace even decided to implement SAP AG software last August, the Montreal-based aircraft manufacturing company knew it would need an integration platform to make the deployment seamless across its mission-critical applications.

Armed with statistics from Environment Canada of more than 67,000 tons of electronic junk and 134 million unwanted computers and computer systems in Canada by 2005, Dell Canada Inc. recently launched a donation program for used computers in an effort to provide technology for schools and charities.