Stories by Chris Kanaracus

Oracle has quietly made its Fusion Applications generally available, albeit with a caveat, but it seems that any serious fanfare over the long-awaited software may be reserved until the company's annual OpenWorld conference in October.
"All Fusion Apps are GA but under controlled availability," said Chris Leone, group vice president of Oracle Fusion Application Development, in a statement. "We review the project to make sure that the fit is right and the customer will be successful. It is a standard Oracle program."

Oracle is planning to issue 78 patches covering a number of its software products on Tuesday, including 13 fixes for its flagship database, according to a statement posted to its website on Thursday.

IBM's Netezza division is rolling out a new analytic appliance that can analyze up to 10 petabytes of data "in a matter of minutes," the company is expected to announce Wednesday during the Enzee Universe conference in Boston.

SAP's HANA (high performance analytic appliance) in-memory computing engine went into general availability on Monday, giving the vendor a flashy new weapon against the likes of Oracle's Exadata data-processing machine and others in a highly competitive market.

ERP (enterprise resource planning) software investments aren't on this year's agenda for three-quarters of IT decision-makers who responded to a recent Forrester Research study, indicating that the global economic downturn's effects are still lingering.

Oracle has introduced support for Apple's iPad and iPhone as part of a slew of enhancements to its BI (business intelligence) software, the company announced Tuesday.

Hewlett-Packard announced Monday it plans to buy data warehousing and analytics vendor Vertica for an undisclosed sum.

SAP is gearing up to launch Business Objects 4.0, its biggest BI (business intelligence) release in roughly three years, later this month at an event in New York.

Microsoft announced Monday that its Dynamics CRM Online software is now available in 40 markets around the world, bringing it in closer competition with Salesforce.com and Oracle's CRM on Demand.

Dell said Thursday it is in advanced talks with storage vendor Compellent Technologies regarding a merger that would call for Dell to pay US$27.50 per share, or roughly $876 million, for the company.

Salesforce.com is getting into the cloud database business with a new on-demand service, Database.com, set to be announced Tuesday at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

Former Oracle co-president Charles Phillips emerged as CEO of ERP (enterprise resource planning) software vendor Infor on Monday, about six weeks after he was replaced at Oracle by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd.

Hewlett-Packard and Oracle have settled the lawsuit HP filed against its former CEO and current Oracle co-President Mark Hurd as well as "reaffirmed their long-term strategic partnership," the companies said Monday.

Hewlett-Packard has announced it has agreed to purchase security vendor ArcSight for US$1.5 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.
ArcSight sells a series of products for monitoring suspicious activity on corporate networks. Combined with HP's own IT management software, the products will allow customers to detect threats, understand their impact and take corrective action, said Bill Veghte, executive vice president of software and solutions at HP, during a conference call.

Hewlett-Packard is suing its former CEO, Mark Hurd, who was named co-president of rival Oracle on Monday, saying his hiring violates the terms of a severance agreement he signed with HP.
Hurd left HP last month after a scandal involving an undisclosed relationship with a contractor and alleged improprieties with expense reports.