Stacy Cowley

CRM heavyweight Siebel Systems Inc. is prepared to once again dive into the hosted applications market, this time in partnership with longtime ally IBM Corp.

Red Hat Inc. released this week the first public beta of its forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, featuring scalability, clustering and security enhancements.

Although Sun Microsystems Inc. discontinued sales several months ago of its customized Linux distribution, the company hasn't entirely abandoned its do-it-yourself Linux strategy. In its forthcoming bundle of desktop software, code-named Mad Hatter, the included Linux operating system will be Sun's own.

Hosted CRM (customer relationship management) provider UpShot Corp. plans to unveil new dashboard functionality for its software service, offering snapshots of operational data.

Several top IBM Corp. executives are discussing plans to move some U.S. positions to other countries with less expensive labour and infrastructure costs, according to officials at two organizations seeking to unionize IT workers.

Two years after Siebel Systems Inc. shut down Sales.com, the company appears to be once again considering a foray into the hosted customer relationship management (CRM) market, this time through a joint offering with longtime partner IBM Corp.

The brawl that's erupted between Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft Inc. over Oracle's attempted hostile takeover of its rival is placing pricing pressure on vendors throughout the enterprise applications market, SAP AG executives said Thursday during a New York press conference following the company's second-quarter earnings report.

IBM Corp. said Tuesday it has acquired Sydney-based Web content management software developer Presence Online Pty Ltd., better known as Aptrix, whose technology IBM intends to add to its Lotus portfolio of collaboration and information management software.