Tom Sullivan

Grid computing got a big boost on Wednesday when Platform Computing Inc. made the open-source Globus toolkit commercially available and pulled together through partnerships another grid solution that Compaq Computer Corp. will sell.

Manugistics Group Inc. on Thursday introduced WebConnect Suite, a package for Web-based application integration.

At its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft quietly revealed an updated version of its SQLXML Web release add-on for the SQL Server 2000 database.

IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are working to pull BI (business intelligence) and knowledge management under a single umbrella, with the goal of providing a new generation of BI that includes both structured and unstructured data.

Application server vendors are gearing up to do battle with IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. in the Web services game by strengthening their infrastructure toolkits and support for standards.

As application server vendors face an increasingly commoditized market, they are refocusing efforts on the applications that differentiate them and on extending those wares to one another's platforms.

In what Sun Microsystems Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., is calling the first offering of its Sun Open Net Environment (ONE) Web services strategy, the company partnered with iPlanet and i2 Technologies Inc. to build an order management and fulfillment system.

Less than one week after rival Oracle Corp. put the finishing touches on its pending 9i database and set a shipping date, IBM Corp. on Tuesday detailed a forthcoming version of DB2 UDB (Universal Database).