China Martens

HP is offering more services supporting application vendor SAP's service-oriented architecture approach to IT as part of the companies' increasingly close relationship.

SAP AG's revelation that it plans to launch a hosted suite of midmarket applications has drawn a collective whoop of delight from rival on-demand applications vendors Salesforce.com Inc. and NetSuite Inc. that see the move as further validation for the software-as-a-service (SAAS) business model.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is adding a new business unit within its Enterprise Storage and Server (ESS) organization as a way to highlight its IT management, automation and virtualization software.

Oracle Corp. is making further inroads into the Linux space, this time in providing management tools for the open-source operating system, after its surprise October announcement of full global support for the Red Hat Inc. Enterprise Linux distribution.

In the midst of a companywide restructuring effort, Hewlett-Packard Co. has taken the next step in an ongoing reorganization of its softwares operation. The vendor has established a new unit to bring together its business intelligence (BI) and information management expertise, which is currently spread out across the company.

IBM Corp. has announced the first two in a planned series of eight centers around the world designed to help build up local expertise in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to IT development.

As more companies apply a service-oriented architecture approach to their IT systems, one user that became serious about its SOA deployment last year suggests its peers keep open minds about the new concept's possibilities.

Titan, which will probably be officially known as Dynamics CRM 4.0, will be the first Microsoft CRM release based on a multitenant architecture and using a single code base