Stories by: Stacy Cowley

SAP has made its long-awaited dive into the hosted, subscription customer relationship management on demand market, launching a new software service with a starting monthly price tag of $US75 per user. But SAP won't be going head-to-head with on-demand trailblazers such as Salesforce.com: Its system carries a 100-user minimum, restricting its potential customers to the enterprise clients SAP traditionally targets.

Microsoft is merging its Exchange and Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) groups into a new unit called the Unified Communications Group, the company announced Monday. The change is aimed at aligning development work on Microsoft's e-mail platform with that done around other communications systems like instant messaging, Web conferencing and phone/VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol).

3Com on Friday named R. Scott Murray its new chief executive officer (CEO), replacing retiring CEO Bruce Claflin, who announced earlier this month that he would step down after five years of helming the networking vendor.

CA turned in a third-quarter profit nearly twice last year's total, as CA's overhauled management team continues working to rebuild the software company's business. Revenue during the quarter rose 5 per cent from the year-ago quarter, living up to management's cautious forecasts.

IBM ended 2005 with strong earnings, but essentially flat sales, as it reported net income for the year of $US8 billion on revenue of $US91.1 billion.

Salesforce.com went live this week with a heavily publicized major update, adding a new platform called AppExchange for easily deploying third-party applications to extend the functionality of Salesforce.com's CRM (customer relationship management) system.

After a string of disappointing quarters, Siebel Systems announced that it exceeded sales forecasts in its fourth quarter, which is likely to be its last as an independent company.

CA has acquired Control-F1, an IT-support automation software maker based in Calgary, Alberta. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SAP is blazing ahead with the next iteration of its NetWeaver technology and its Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), even as most of its customers trail several technology generations behind the ERP (enterprise resource planning) giant.

Enterprise software is dead -- long live enterprise software.

IBM shipped the latest version of its Alphablox analytics software last week, adding deeper integration support for linking the software with its Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Portal Server products.