Technology Industry Archive

If your name isn’t Google or Yahoo, being a search vendor is something like being a pro wrestler in the 1960s, with fervent but tiny crowds following you to dilapidated arenas in third-tier cities. Devotees of enterprise search insist that the technology will pay for itself, but the vendors are hard-pressed to prove it. Enterprise search should be a no-brainer. These  companies, often...

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Intel threatens to pull AMD cross-license agreement — Intel apparently really doesn’t like that AMD spun off its manufacturing assets and is saying that it will pull out of the cross-licensing agreement the two companies have within 60 days. The problem is that AMD is restricted from transferring the license and the spinoff, Globalfoundaries, is an independent company. [Source:...

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I’ve been asked by InformationWeek to put together and host a webcast called Escaping the Rock and Hard Place: Surviving & Thriving in a Time of Turmoil and Tight Budgets. Speakers include Margot Sharapova, CIO of GE Healthcare Medical Diagnostics, and Eric Johnson, Director of the Glassmeyer/McNamee Center for Digital Strategies Mayer at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth...

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Gaul may have been divided into three parts, but Salesforce.com sees the call center market as divided in two. However, it may not have territory to itself for long. Alex Dayon, senior vice president of the service & support business at Salesforce.com, told me the company sees the same dearth of applications for the low end of the call center market (defined as 200 seats or less) as it did...

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Last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a one word answer, no, to the question of whether his company would buy the New York Times. The answer was as definitive as you can get, but might be as wrong-headed as many other decisions that management there has made over the last few years. But let’s not single out Microsoft. Every tech company — including Google and Yahoo, which are...

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Salesforce.com, the $1 billion vanguard of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, is betting its next $1 billion in revenues will come from disrupting the call center industry. The company that declared death to on-premise software with SFA, its flagship on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and which has built an entire ecosystem of SaaS offerings around its AppExchange...

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The industry has been closely monitoring the Tafas v. Doll (formerly Tafas v. Dudas) lawsuit over whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would be able to make rule changes that would significantly limit patent applications. Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) announced its ruling, and the net result won’t leave any of the interested parties in unqualified...

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SAP and Oracle both announced new components for their growing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) technology suit in the past 10 days. GRC applications are typically sold to public and large privately held companies, especially those operating in heavily-regulated industries, and are intended to perform a variety of critical functions including electronic document search and retrieval,...

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Consolidation isn’t just something that happens to physical things like data centers. It’s also a phenomenon affecting financial services and other industries that are among the biggest consumers of IT products and services. Ivan Chong, general manager of Informatica’s data quality business unit, explained that different financial services companies can have up to seven...

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When the rumor that IBM would acquire Sun hit yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, you just know that many tech execs got a glint in their eye. Either they were at a big company that would have to protect its interests in the market or they worked at a small company that might be desperate for a way out of the cash burn rate death spiral. Whether or not IBM and Sun actually hit the altar is...

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