China Martens

IBM Corp. has chosen Sao Paulo as the sixth global location for its specialized software and services laboratories known as "Hipods" or high-performance on-demand solutions facilities, which focus on resolving large-scale computing issues for IBM customers, including eBay Inc. and Google Inc.

For IT managers who have spent many frustrating hours trying to get their disparate systems to work, the new draft specification of SML (service modeling language) by ten leading vendors is great news.

Oracle Corp. continued to release pieces of its PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 applications suite, turning its attentions to performance management. The move is part of Oracle's most substantial revamp of the suite since acquiring PeopleSoft in January 2005.

It's going to be a while before Oracle Project Fusion - the company's new suite of enterprise applications - is anywhere near completion. "We're less than halfway through," John Wookey, senior vice-president of application development at Oracle, said last week.

Rival hosted application providers NetSuite Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. compete tooth and nail, so it's no surprise that both of them have announced tools to track and manage search engine marketing campaigns almost simultaneously.

What if the Google Maps app on your mobile phone could flag the location of restaurants, provide special offers on food or goods, or offer real-time information on gas station prices? A new Google maps overlay may make all that possible.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, remains unimpressed with a proposed update to the license that governs the open source operating system and has no plans to adopt it for the Linux kernel.

An alliance of leading software vendors late last month announced progress on specifications to define a language-neutral programming model for application development within SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments.