Enterprise software

Salesforce.com, Oracle merge clouds in nine-year deal

Big news in enterprise land today: sometime-rivals Salesforce.com and Oracle announced Tuesday morning a nine-year partnership to integrate their clouds.

The deal encompasses all three tiers of cloud computing: applications, platform, and infrastructure.

For Salesforce.com's part, the company plans to standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, Exadata engineered systems, the Oracle Database and Java Middleware Platform.

For Oracle's part, the company plans to integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle's Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud, as well as provide the core technology to power Salesforce.com's applications and platform. Salesforce.com will also implement Oracle'… Read more

Klout partners with Microsoft's Yammer in social business push

Your co-workers will now be able to see how influential you are through a new partnership between Klout and Microsoft's Yammer.

Klout, which gives users an influence or Klout score based on their presence on social media and the general Web, will now allow users to show their Klout score and topics of influence in their Yammer profiles, the company said Tuesday in a blog post. Klout also is beginning the process of ingesting data from Yammer to create a Yammer-specific Klout Score.

Here's the example Klout gave for how this could work:

Imagine your graphic designer is … Read more

Dell special committee says Icahn bid lacks credibility

Activist investor Carl Icahn's bid for Dell lacks credibility, the computer maker's board said in a regulatory filing Monday.

The comments echo remarks made last week by the group managing Dell's efforts to go private. At that time, the board rejected the latest takeover proposal put forth by Icahn as lacking key details necessary for its approval.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday, the board said that Icahn "has failed to provide any of the key provisions and mechanics" of letters he sent on May 9 or June 18, as requested by … Read more

What's the 'Internet of Everything' worth? $613 billion, Cisco reckons

Cisco Systems wants its customers to know that there is a huge amount of money to be made if they focus their strategy and IT budget on what the company and others call the Internet of Everything.

That's the idea that more than half of the people and 99 percent of the things on the planet are unconnected and that by connecting them and riding the wave of industry transformations, such as smart factories, digital health, mobile collaboration, virtual assistants, and connected commercial vehicles, giant profits will follow.

In other words, the companies that invest in the "connections … Read more

Ready or not, compulsory Creative Cloud cometh

It's been a bumpy few weeks for Adobe since announcing its controversial decision to move all its "perpetual license" Creative Suite applications to a subscription-only plan -- almost 32,000 people have signed a petition against the move and our own survey with Jeffries indicates that "Creative Suite users loathe Adobe's subscriptions" -- but as of Monday night it's officially here.

If you've bought into or opt to buy into the plan, you'll get a host of interesting application updates, settings sync via the cloud, and access to all of Adobe'… Read more

IBM to buy cloud specialist SoftLayer

IBM said Tuesday it is buying SoftLayer Technologies, as the computing giant aims to bolster its cloud computing efforts.

While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, the Wall Street Journal said the acquisition is worth around $2 billion, citing a person familiar with the deal.

IBM will create a new cloud services division within its Global Services unit that will house SoftLayer as a standalone company. It will act as a junction box between other cloud services the company owns.

Big Blue says the acquisition will help it to beef up its ability to integrate public and … Read more

City of Boston drops Microsoft Exchange for Gmail

As Google gears up for its big week in the spotlight, it's making another notch in its business software belt. The city of Boston has decided to switch the e-mail provider of its 20,000 employees from Microsoft to Google, The Boston Globe reported Friday.

In addition to using Gmail instead of Microsoft Exchange, Boston will also swap in Google Docs for word processing and Google's cloud service for storing documents. The city will pay Google about $800,000 for the move but will save around $280,000 a year for dropping the Microsoft products.

Google told the … Read more

Wix: Come for our site builder, stay for Google Apps

The popular Web-site builder Wix has inked a deal with Google to help small business customers install branded Google Apps.

Wix, which lets individuals and businesses build sites in HTML5 via an app market and drag-and-drop editor, announced Thursday that its partnership with Google will allow small businesses to sign up for Google Apps with one click. A subsequent two-click process will set up and brand apps -- including Gmail and Google Drive -- for companies.

"Branded email has been one of our most frequently requested features, and it was this that led to our decision to integrate Google … Read more

Azure, Yammer help shape next-gen Microsoft Office

In a break from the past, Microsoft's Office team has begun working much more closely with other groups, especially the Windows Azure, SQL Server, and Windows Intune teams -- all of which are part of another business unit, Microsoft's Server and Tools Business.

"Before, we had to land in very complementary dates," explained Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of Office Servers and Services. "But now, if Azure has a new feature, we can say we'd like to do work around it." With services, "there's no magic date when a computer has … Read more