Craig Stedman

As the economic news continues to get bleaker, double-digit budget cuts are becoming a fact of life in many IT departments - resulting in postponed purchases, delayed projects, hiring freezes and layoffs.

Executives from Sun Microsystems Inc.'s software group Tuesday said that the company plans to ship a version of its Java Enterprise System server software for Red Hat Linux within 60 days. But they also took direct aim at Red Hat Inc.'s Linux offering as a key rival of Sun's Solaris operating system.

IBM Corp. has announced upgrades of two content management tools and said it will ship additional features later this year as part of an effort to broaden its support for managing corporate information other than relational data.

Attachmate Corp. plans to announce software for integrating legacy mainframe and minicomputer applications with newer systems, the first of two steps it's taking to expand beyond the shrinking terminal-emulation market.

As far back as the mid-1990s, companies began bucking the IT decentralization trend by moving Unix and Windows servers into their data centers. But many data center managers are still struggling to coordinate systems management processes between their mainframes and the newer servers.

PeopleSoft is planning to ship two upgrades of its CRM software during the next four months in an effort to match market leader Siebel Systems on functionality.

PeopleSoft Inc. plans to ship two upgrades of its customer relationship management (CRM) software during the next four months in an effort to match market leader Siebel Systems Inc. on functionality.

The first two of the seven new top-level domains (TLD) approved for addition to the official Internet domain name system became operational Wednesday after the U.S. Department of Commerce gave the go-ahead for them to be activated.