Software

Business software vendor, Sybiz Software, has launched a marketing tool for its A/NZ channel partners.

Windows developers are confirming the results of a survey released yesterday that found fewer than 1 in 12 programmers currently writing applications targeting Windows Vista.

Facing serious challenges to its dominance in the RIA (rich Internet application) space, Adobe Systems will refresh its bread-and-butter Flash Player technology Thursday with capabilities that could provide an edge on the RIA battleground.

Yahoo will make available to all developers its Search Monkey platform on Thursday, another step in its wide-ranging effort to open up its sites and services.

In an announcement overshadowed by Hewlett-Packard's $US13.9 billion bid for services provider EDS, Oracle has announced it plans to buy AdminServer, a Pennsylvania company that makes policy administration software for the insurance industry, for an undisclosed sum.

Since the public release of its earliest version last year, Silverlight has been touted as Microsoft's Flash killer. This relatively new Web development platform aims to challenge Adobe's venerable Flash (and associated Flex development tools) in the online multimedia space.

It took no more than a few cases of miniature, toy flying pigs being handed out at Microsoft's annual management conference in April to dramatize how significantly the company's strategy for building a management platform has changed in the past five years.

In the beginning, Mainsoft released Visual MainWin for Java EE, which compiled .Net CIL (Common Intermediate Language) code into Java bytecode. As technically fascinating as that was, on its own it provided limited traction. Much of Microsoft's attractiveness to the enterprise goes beyond its .Net languages and runtime frameworks. It is Microsoft's enterprise applications such as SharePoint and SQL Server that -- for many enterprise programmers -- make the .Net environment worth using. A tool that simply moves .Net code into Java moves that code out of reach of Microsoft's enterprise applications.

Aras was a small, struggling software maker that stirred up a hornet's nest early last year, when it made a pair of seemingly contradictory decisions.

Everywhere you go these days, people are using BlackBerries to check e-mail and set up appointments. But the march toward everyday use of more complex business applications on smartphones is going slowly at best.

Mike Milinkovich is the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, a nonprofit that oversees an open source community focused on application development tools. Founded by IBM in 2001, Eclipse became independently managed in 2004 and now boasts that more than 4 million people worldwide use Eclipse and Eclipse-based products. EBay, for example, used Eclipse to build much of its online architecture. Milinkovich this week discussed the Eclipse organization and its goals with Senior Writer Jon Brodkin.

Two years ago, when Google took its first steps in the office productivity market, the move generated much buzz, mostly because it was seen as another competitive clash with Microsoft.

Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, says corporate customers still need to become more comfortable with hosted application delivery before it will really take off. Glotzbach sat down with Computerworld during the AIIM International Conference last week to talk about Google's fledgling Google Apps software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and how the company plans to compete with traditional application vendors like Oracle and SAP AG and with new hosted offerings from top vendors like Microsoft.

When Richard Jalichandra became Technorati's CEO in October, the company, a blogging and Web 2.0 pioneer, had generated enough drama in recent years to rival a soap opera.

SugarCRM began in 2004 and offers its Sugar CRM package via a hybrid commercial-open source model and delivers it via onsite and on-demand modes. The company has amassed more than 3,000 customers in 30 countries, SugarCRM officials said. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Clint Oram, SugarCRM co-founder and vice president of open source community relations, at the company's conference in California this week to talk about the company and where it is headed.

Sun Microsystems is trying to rejuvenate Java, using the JavaOne conference last week to position the 13-year-old Java platform as a foundation for next-generation technologies in such spaces as rich Internet applications and cloud-based services.

It took the United States just 45 months to defeat the combined forces of Germany, Japan, and Italy. It has taken SAP 48 months to get Business ByDesign, its SaaS (software as a service) play for the SMB market, off the ground. And it still isn't ready for prime time.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: SFF (small form factor) drives allow you to squeeze more spindles into the same rack space, giving you better performance in the same real estate. As an bonus, using 2.5-inch drives reduces the amount of electricity you use and creates less heat than using their larger cousins, essentially making your storage array less demanding on your wallet and on the electric grid.

Even though it seems to signal a shift from its PC-centric corporate philosophy, I wouldn't call Microsoft's Live Mesh offering a disruptive technology. If anything, it's an accommodating technology.

Symantec seems to be one of those companies that toiled for 25 years to become an overnight success. The company has grown rapidly through mergers and acquisitions, not the least of which was systems management company Altiris in April 2007. Now in 2008, Symantec is a powerhouse player in security, systems management, application virtualization, storage management and compliance.

If the many business-oriented blog and wiki solutions are starting to look like one big blur, you're not alone. Most "Web 2.0 collaboration" vendors give you a departmental wiki that works about the same as the rest, but doesn't handle large enterprise deployments or connect with information in other parts of your organization. About a year ago, Jive Software successfully brought a lot of attention to the enterprise social networking category with Clearspace and Clearspace X, collaboration and community platforms, respectively, that provided unusual scalability and usability -- plus they integrated blogs and wikis across the business.

If I'm not otherwise engaged next Thursday morning, I just might spend my economic stimulus check to enter the PC server business. I could go shopping for a wholesale 1U bare-bones rack server, with my primary criteria being that it boot DOS from a floppy and require you to take your server off-line to change basic system settings. I'll stuff that two-socket black box with RAM, CPUs, and disks; charge you for your choice of Windows or Linux; and unless you're buying these things by the gross, stick you with desktop-grade support. Since I had no involvement in your server's design and engineering, I'll rely on BIOS and driver updates from my volume motherboard supplier. I'll selectively pass these on to you, flagged with warnings about how they may render your system unusable if you misapply them, until my supplier stops issuing them. Don't worry, you'll have a solid year before that happens.

AdventNet's Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is a new, low-cost subscription-based SaaS offering that may be impossible to ignore. Building on a Professional edition that combines sales, service, marketing, and inventory management modules, Zoho Enterprise aims to meet the needs of corporate customers with such features as organizational management (including hierarchical group definitions), role-based security on data access and information sharing, SSL transport, and broader interface customizations.

The success of a BPM (business process management) initiative hangs on a good plan. Spend too little time developing a snapshot of your company's inner workings, and the resulting system of misfiring rules and unhandled exceptions will find you mired in costly troubleshooting. But, sure enough, you can also lean too far in the other direction. Spend too much time charting workflow definitions, control points, and exception management, and the delays will start whittling away at your ROI.

Trend Micro's latest security and antivirus release, Internet Security Pro 2008, offers a clean interface that's simple to navigate and fairly straightforward to set up.