Stories by: China Martens

Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS.

IBM is hoping to broaden the appeal of its Sametime enterprise IM software by expanding the current standalone offering into a family of products in a bid to better compete with other unified communications players like Microsoft and Cisco.

As SugarCRM readies the final version of its Sugar 5.0 commercial and open-source customer relationship management software, the vendor is planning a new platform edition of the software for developers.

Apparently it's not enough that Sun peppers any and all discussions of its hardware and software products with liberal mentions of its Java programming language, now the vendor wants Wall Street to sit up and take more note of its homegrown technology too.

IBM is hoping to broaden the appeal of its Sametime enterprise IM software by expanding the current stand-alone offering into a family of products in a bid to better compete with other unified communications players like Microsoft and Cisco.

Workday, the startup headed by Dave Duffield, the co-founder of PeopleSoft, put more meat on the bones of its ERP (enterprise resource planning) software Monday with the beta release of its financials on-demand service.

SAP intends to give customers and partners a significant update on its planned on-demand software, known as A1S, at an event taking place in New York on September 19.

IBM is extending its support for Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system to cover more of its x86 servers and blades, the two vendors announced Thursday.

Oracle has issued details on pricing for its new 11g enterprise database, with the vendor making some of the most talked-about features available as extra-cost add-ons.

Oracle expects to release pricing information for 11g, the latest version of its enterprise database, on Tuesday, according to a company spokesperson.

Oracle has brought out the first version of the Coherence in-memory data grid software since acquiring Tangosol earlier this year and over time hopes to dramatically widen the appeal of the product.