Stacy Cowley

Struggling software vendor Baan Co. NV is up for sale, parent company Invensys PLC said as it announced plans to divest a number of non-core operations.

One week before its long-awaited launch of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Corp. said it is rolling out a new umbrella brand for its array of server software.

Flaws in IBM Corp.'s DB2 database software were responsible for a chain of glitches that turned a routine hardware repair into a weeklong operational crisis, Danske Bank said recently in a report on an outage it suffered in March.

Microsoft Corp. has acknowledged and patched a glitch with its Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) update that can cause system slowdowns, but has not yet made its still-developing fix widely available.

When Microsoft Corp. releases in June the next update of its Microsoft Office suite, a version tailored for small and medium businesses (SMBs) will be included in the product line, according to Microsoft.

An updated version of IBM Corp.'s WebSphere Business Integration Server software will be out later this month, according to the company, along with two new add-on modules based on technology IBM acquired in September through its purchase of Holosofx Inc.

A strong majority of companies surveyed for a recent IDC study expect to maintain or increase their IT spending in 2003, but those plans are tightly tied to worldwide economic stability, according to the research firm.

The first version of a specification that the Embedded Linux Consortium hopes will aid application interoperability and spur interest in Linux development in the market for built-in systems software was released Wednesday.