Marc L. Songini

Oracle Corp. this week shed some light on its nascent plans to converge five business application suites -- a move once seen as a big selling point for Oracle as it pursued a hostile takeover of PeopleSoft Inc. Oracle President Charles Phillips Wednesday gave an update on the company's "Fusion" road map and fielded questions at a customer event here, one of several being held throughout North America.

Executives from the Dallas-based company also outlined vision for what they called the closed-loop supply chain, a combination of technology and processes that allow customers to cut costs, boost supply chain efficiency and help them resolve glitches with on-the-fly workarounds.

Three and a half years ago, the Los Angeles city government's US$11 million purchasing and accounts payable software implementation was looking imperiled.

Unveils a series of initiatives to help companies roll out software implementations more successfully and consolidate customer views in real time.

Oracle Corp. is expanding the management functionality offered to users of its business applications and is working with members of the independent Oracle Applications Users Group to improve its technical support and software development processes.

IBM Corp. this week said it's ready to ship the next version of its DB2 Universal Database software, which offers self-management capabilities that are designed to reduce administrative overhead even as databases continue to grow bigger.

A child-support case management and telephony system that's expected to cost the U.K. government US$806.5 million over 10 years is in danger of being unplugged if the agency overseeing the project can't fix technical and operational problems within the next few months.

Glitches during an SAP AG supply chain rollout hit computer systems vendor Hewlett-Packard Co. hard in its bottom line, and the fallout from the implementation apparently led to the firing of three HP executives.