Software: News

Red Hat rolled out on Monday updates to its SOA platform and development tools in the company's JBoss middleware product line at the EclipseCon 2010 conference.

Microsoft's new desktop virtualization initiatives announced yesterday are a long-anticipated move to make desktop and application virtualization easier and cheaper for enterprises. But it's also part of a broader Microsoft strategy to capture market share from virtualization arch-rival VMware.

Startup Viridity Software is releasing a new tool on Monday to help companies keep track of the power being used by each piece of IT equipment in their data centers, with a view to improving energy efficiency.

Novell is ready to begin beta testing its Pulse enterprise social-networking and collaboration suite.

Marten Mickos, the longtime CEO of MySQL who eventually sold the open-source database company to Sun Microsystems for US$1 billion, has taken a new job as CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, the company said Friday.

US-headquartered business software vendor, Infor, has signed its first original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement with longstanding reseller, Eclipse Computing.

Microsoft today announced service packs for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but declined to set a release date or a schedule for getting a beta in users' hands.

In an effort to capture what it sees as a growing market for virtual desktops within enterprises, Microsoft is simplifying some licensing agreements and enhancing its virtual-desktop-related software.

Google is now publicly testing a new feature for its Calendar application that auto-suggests a new time and date for a meeting that needs to be rescheduled.

Many South by Southwest attendees reportedly walked out halfway through the keynote appearance by Twitter CEO Evan Williams this week citing boredom, but the announcement he made on stage deserves careful attention, according to industry experts.

Google has released version 4.1 of Google Maps for Android, adding a constantly-updated map wallpaper, tweaking the way search results are displayed and adding a new Latitude widget for tracking your friends.

Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), will not run on Windows XP, now or when the software eventually ships, the company confirmed this week.

A court in Texas has ordered Microsoft to pay communications software maker VirnetX US$105.75 million after a jury found it guilty of willful infringement of two patents belonging to the company.

More than half of companies that implement ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems end up garnering no more than 30 percent of the business benefits they expected, according to a new study released by systems integrator Panorama Consulting Group.

Google has created a free tool to simplify and automate the migration of e-mail, calendar and contacts data from Microsoft Exchange servers to its Google Apps collaboration and communication hosted suite.

Facebook has revamped its search engine so that suggested results drop down from the search box as people type in their queries.

Microsoft has removed the cut and paste function from its forthcoming mobile phone OS, Windows Phone 7.

Oracle's commitment to Java and the ubiquity of the technology were stressed Wednesday by Java founder James Gosling in a presentation that also centered on the recently released Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6 specification.

Virtustream is unveiling a new cloud computing service aimed at midsize enterprises.

IBM will soon offer software development and testing services through its public cloud, adding to a private cloud option launched in June 2009, the company said Tuesday.