Stories by Chris Kanaracus

Dell has announced it is buying Quest Software for US$2.4 billion, following weeks of speculation over its interest in the infrastructure software vendor. The deal is expected to close later this year.

Salesforce.com experienced system problems in a number of regions on Thursday, starting at 3:34 a.m. PDT, according to an online status page.

CIOs face a common set of thorny challenges these days, namely the pressure to deliver innovations even as they seek to cut or hold down spending, according to an array of senior IT executives who spoke on Tuesday at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SAP is hoping to stake out some turf in the predictive analytics software market with a new application, BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis software, which was announced Tuesday.

Oracle is buying cloud-based talent management and employee recruitment software vendor Taleo for roughly US$1.9 billion, the company announced Thursday. The move comes shortly after SAP's move to acquire SuccessFactors, a close competitor of Taleo, for US$3.4 billion in a deal that has yet to close.
"Human capital management has become a strategic initiative for organisations," said Thomas Kurian , executive vice president, Oracle Development, in a statement. "Taleo's industry leading talent management cloud is an important addition to the Oracle Public Cloud."

IBM has signed a deal to buy supply and contract management software vendor Emptoris in another bid to fill out its growing catalog of business-to-business and business-to-consumer commerce technologies, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the deal, which is scheduled to close in the first quarter of next year, were not provided.

IBM is buying analytics vendor DemandTec for US$440 million in a bid to build out its line of e-commerce software, the companies announced Thursday. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

Dell is rounding out its cloud CRM (customer relationship management) service with the addition of Salesforce.com's Service Cloud customer-service software, the companies announced Wednesday.
The service joins Salesforce.com's core CRM sales application in Dell's Cloud Business Applications offering, which also incorporates the Boomi integration framework for connecting the software to on-premise systems or other cloud services.

SAP could be entering significant new product categories soon, judging from remarks made by co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe on Thursday.

Oracle is buying RightNow Technologies for about US$1.5 billion in order to boost its recently announced Public Cloud with customer-service software, the companies have announced. The deal is expected to close late this year or in early 2012.

Oracle on Tuesday will release 76 patches affecting hundreds of its products as well as Java SE.

Oracle unveiled the Big Data Appliance, the newest addition to its line of products that combine software and hardware, during the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Monday.

Oracle's OpenWorld conference, which kicks off this Sunday in San Francisco, could be the biggest one yet for the company, which entered the hardware game last year through the purchase of Sun Microsystems and is closing in on US$40 billion in revenue.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker was ousted from his position and replaced by HP director and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, less than a year after he took the job.

As reports swirled of Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker's imminent ouster from the company after less than a year on the job, some observers suggested that if such a thing indeed comes to pass, it won't be that much of a surprise.