James Niccolai

Outsourcing is easiest, Linux is great and Web services have been hyped like something out of the women's fashion industry, Oracle Corp.'s chairman and chief executive officer said Tuesday in a wide ranging address at Oracle AppsWorld.

Rick Belluzzo, Microsoft Corp.'s president and chief operating officer (COO) and a force behind the growth of its .Net, Xbox and MSN efforts, is to leave the company, Microsoft said Wednesday.

Oracle Corp. this week will extend its outsourcing program to include its Oracle9i database and application server products, a company executive said Friday.

Providing a consistent way to run Java programs on PCs, cell phones and other client computers is the next hurdle in the evolution of Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java technology, the head of Sun's Java and XML (Extensible Markup Language) software group said Monday.

Using Java to build applications that can be sent over the airwaves to cellular phones and handheld computers will be a central theme at Sun Microsystems Inc.'s JavaOne conference, which kicks off Monday at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

At the JavaOne conference next week, Sun Microsystems and IBM will announce a joint plan to define a new Java specification intended to make life easier for developers building portals.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has filed a private federal antitrust lawsuit in a U.S. court against Microsoft Corp., accusing the company of harming competition by using its monopoly in the market for PC operating systems to undermine the success of Sun's Java technology, the company said Friday.

The head of BEA Systems Inc. recently offered the first public glimpse of WebLogic Workshop, a new development framework intended to lure more developers to BEA's software by making it easier for programmers to create Java-based Web services.