Advising on the commercial impact of technology and
    market changes in telecoms, software and IT services

One of the most awaited strategies in the middle-tier software space has been Oracle's plan to integrate the acquired BEA product suite and organization, a plan Oracle laid out on 1 July 2008.

Cognos provides IBM with a logical extension to its information management product portfolio and plugs some functional gaps in the company's Information on Demand (IOD) vision.

At its recent Influencer Summit in Boston Business Objects-SAP unveiled a triple-edged product strategy that blends enterprise performance management, business intelligence and governance, risk and compliance (GRC). Integration is happening at pace on mu

Following on from a strong fiscal 2007, Microsoft has had a very good fiscal 1Q08. Its lead in the software market still seems unassailable.

IBM is moving from strength to strength thanks to its success in integrating once disparate assets to deliver true business solutions, rather than just IT solutions.

IBM can claim what is arguably the industry's broadest portfolio of unified information management (UIM) software, services and industry-specific solutions. All of these offerings fall under IBM's cross-company Information on Demand (IOD) initiative.

What has been missing from the green IT discussion to date is the critical role of enterprise software in accomplishing the broader corporate efficiency task, and the market opportunity this represents.

Truviso is the latest vendor in the complex event processing (CEP) space to try to disrupt the status quo of traditional batch-oriented business intelligence (BI) and analytics.

We are what we eat - but are we also what we Google? Steve Hodgkinson ponders the parallels between our thickening waists and our thinning attention spans.

Australia's biggest public sector outsourcing tender takes another step forward with the shortlisting of vendors to compete for the end-user computing contract.

Are the recent service outages by cloud computing and SaaS providers reason to doubt the future of cloud computing? We think not, but you should plan for occasional dry spells.

Symantec has grown rapidly both by organic growth and by acquisition. It is now much broader than security and storage management. It has an enviable financial record and an impressive product set.

A high-level framework that captures the key information relating to vendors' strategies, and how they are executed. Identifying the positioning and key messages from the vendor around information management, its vision, and its current capabilities.

It is still early to predict how well Teradata will fare as an independent firm. But it's certainly no start-up and needs to ensure its momentum continues by regularly delivering new product releases and enhancements and also product expansion and innova

The OATH group has not yet made a big impact. It is one of many initiatives in identity management coming from both the open source and proprietary camps. What has it achieved, how does it relate to other initiatives, and what are its prospects?

Serena is currently trying to reinvent itself, not just as a 'business mashup' provider but also as a SaaS and PPM provider. Overall, we doubt that Serena has and does what it takes to become one of the top SaaS tool and/or business mashup providers.

Microsoft continues to expand the data management capabilities of its SQL Server platform – this time into data quality, after agreeing to buy Israeli start-up Zoomix for an undisclosed amount.

EMC Documentum was quick to remind us that Open Text isn't the only transactional content management (TCM) player on the block, and in fact has a head-start on its rivals and a better integrated offering. Does it?

McAfee intends to acquire Reconnex, a data loss prevention (DLP) vendor. This expands McAfee's product scope, and underlines the increasing importance of DLP in the market. Other vendors need to improve their usability and ease of configuration.

IT organizations are rapidly realizing that there is no "one plan fits all" in an application portfolio modernization and rationalization initiative. Rather, there are many legacy modernization options, forcing the determination of transition status

The OSGi service platform is a Java-based specification for providing a dynamic component or service module system. OSGi has become important because virtually every major Java platform provider is in the process of implementing it as their microkernel.