James Niccolai

IBM Corp. continued to lead the market for application deployment software in 2003, but the field will become far more competitive as customers migrate away from IBM

With many of its potentially costly legal challenges now behind it or nearing resolution, Microsoft Corp. announced plans Tuesday to return about US$75 billion to its shareholders over the next four years, including a special, one-time dividend of US$3 per share

Oracle Corp. is tailoring the next release of its business applications to specific industries and doubling the size of its application server sales force as it tries to wring more dollars out of the server software market.

IBM Corp. continued to lead the market for application deployment software in 2003, but the field will become far more competitive as customers migrate away from IBM's mainframe and OS/400 systems, according to new figures released this week by IDC.

IBM Corp. has started beta testing a software add-on for its WebSphere application server that will help companies with large and complex computing environments improve the uptime and performance of important applications, IBM said Thursday.

The stage is set for some fireworks on the last day of the JavaOne show next week, where Sun Microsystems Inc. has assembled a panel to debate the thorny issue of whether it should release its Java technology under an open source license.

Oracle Corp. and the U.S. Department of Justice are heading to court Monday to do battle over Oracle's hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft Inc., a deal the government says would choke competition in the enterprise applications market and lead to higher prices for customers.

BEA Systems Inc. will distribute an early test version of Quicksilver, a messaging product designed to help customers deploy a services oriented architecture (SOA), with the next major release of its WebLogic server software, company officials said Tuesday.