Stacy Cowley

One month after closing its acquisition of Intranets.com, WebEx Communications Inc. is launching an updated, rebranded version of Intranets.com's hosted collaboration software suite, a move aimed at expanding WebEx's share of the SMB (small and medium business) market before Microsoft Corp. conquers the space.

Oracle Corp. scooped up another small technology maker on Friday, announcing its acquisition of Finnish open-source database technology developer Innobase OY. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

A financial dispute between two major Internet backbones has led to dropped traffic between their networks, a high-stakes game of chicken that's angering customers affected by the network disruptions.

Siebel Systems Inc. CEO George Shaheen shared the stage with a group of Oracle Corp. executives at Oracle

Bowing to market realities, Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday it will begin working with an ideological foe, open-source development and services company JBoss Inc., on optimizing interoperability between JBoss' middleware and Microsoft's Windows Server software.

A pending energy bill expected to soon gain approval from the U.S. Congress means some programmers will once again need to check over their software code for potential problems handling a calendar adjustment.

Every major enterprise applications vendor has hopped on the SOA (services-oriented architecture) bandwagon and extolled the virtues of using standards-compliant software to expose business processes as Web services, reducing the pain of integrating heterogeneous systems. But for customers, implementing an SOA environment in their own data centres can be a complex and lengthy process. One chief technology officer nearing the end of a five-year SOA project says the results, though a long time coming, are worth it.

Automobile repairs and recalls annoy manufacturers as much as they do consumers, adding billions annually to their business costs. IBM Corp. hopes a new bundle of software and services it has developed will help auto manufacturers cut their warranty costs by deploying an analytics-based early warning system.