Kathleen Ohlson

The adoption of services from application service providers is currently in its infancy, but awareness of ASPs is high throughout most of the world, according to initial results from a survey commissioned by the ASP Industry Consortium.

Joining the likes of IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., BEA Systems Inc. next week is expected to map out a Web services strategy that would provide enhanced access to and interaction with business functions over the Internet.

Macromedia Inc. later this month is expected to announce an upgrade to the ColdFusion application server, the last version to be released in C++ before the company switches over to Java with another new version early next year.

That thud you heard last week was the business-to-business market tumbling into the basement.

As part of its continuing effort to bring Linux into the mainstream, IBM Corp. last week introduced technology that will let businesses maintain huge Linux or Unix server farms from a single location.

Big Blue's largest users have spoken: they want IBM Corp. to improve its e-commerce wares and security features. These were just the top two issues that surfaced in a survey by Share, a large IBM user group.

Companies conducting business-to-business (B2B) electronic-commerce could be part of a market expected to total US$8.5 trillion worldwide in 2005, notwithstanding the current economic shakeup, according to a Gartner Research forecast.

Mainframes are a long way from being extinct, at least in the eyes of enterprise development managers, according to a survey conducted by Evans Marketing Services.