Tom Sullivan

Web services promise to make application integration easier, but they won't replace EAI (enterprise application integration) or other flavors of integration such as EDI (electronic data interchange), said Scott Opitz, senior vice-president of marketing at Fairfax, Va.-based webMethods Inc.

Continuing the trend of packing more business intelligence functionality into the database, IBM on May 2 announced it has released DB2 OLAP Server 8.1.

Two emerging companies are working to make Web services more reliable with products that enhance SOAP (simple object access protocol) functionality.

Two emerging companies are working to make Web services more reliable with products that enhance SOAP (simple object access protocol) functionality.

Two emerging companies are working to make Web services more reliable with products that enhance Simple Object Access Protocol functionality.

While the labour shortage in IT continues to loom, including the dwindling base of database administrators, the amount of data itself is growing faster than ever. IBM and some of its competitors are looking to ease the IT labour burden by making database systems more self-responsive and better able to learn ways to function more efficiently.

SAP AG on Thursday announced that it is merging its SAP Portals and SAP Markets divisions into the greater SAP, with an eye toward collaborative applications.

Bowstreet Software Inc. on Monday pried the lid off of a new version of its flagship software, Bowstreet Factory 5. Company officials are calling the upgraded edition an automated assembly environment for Web services.