Carol Sliwa

IBM Corp. caught up to its competition with the delayed release of a new version of its WebSphere application server that features support for Web services technologies and the latest version of Java 2 Enterprise Edition.

Oracle Corp. announced that it's trying to establish a standard way for software vendors to get their Java development tools to work with one another.

Longtime partners Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. last week announced a US$50 million investment to promote, sell and help users build systems that rely on Microsoft's .Net development framework.

IBM Corp.'s new WebSphere Studio Application Developer tool, released last week, adds support for the latest Java technologies and the company's open-source Eclipse development platform.

At this week's Web Services Edge West 2002 conference in San Jose, Web services management will gain some attention when Actional Corp. launches a product that aims to address a need that's expected to emerge.

Microsoft Corp. recently announced plans to synchronize future versions of its Visual Studio .Net development tools with the release of key products, including its upcoming Windows .Net Server operating system and SQL Server database.

Microsoft Corp. advanced its drive into the data storage management market recently with the acquisition of XDegrees Inc., a small developer of software designed to enable secure access to information stored across enterprise systems.

Three years ago, TD Bank Financial Group decided to go with Java as its enterprise development platform, in large part because it wanted its application code to be able to run on different types of hardware.