Stories by Chris Kanaracus

Infor cuts 5 percent of its workforce

Enterprise software maker Infor Global Solutions quietly laid off about 5 percent of its roughly 9,000 workers last week, making it the latest of its peers to trim staff during the economic downturn.

Compuware updates IT project portfolio management tool

Compuware this week released Changepoint 2009, the latest version of its IT project portfolio management software, amid an economic environment where CIOs everywhere are looking to drive down costs.

Gartner lowers worldwide software spending forecast

Gartner has lowered its worldwide enterprise software spending forecast, citing "a combination of economic, technical and regional forces."

Amazon extends EC2 cloud platform to Europe

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform for scalable, pay-as-you-go application and service delivery is now available in Europe, the company said Wednesday.

NetSuite makes its play in Japanese SaaS market

NetSuite on Tuesday launched NetSuite Release J, a version of its on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) application tuned for the Japanese market.

Sun's Mickos: I'm OK with Monty's MySQL 5.1 rant

Michael "Monty" Widenius, original developer of the open-source database MySQL, put a damper on Sun Microsystems' recent release of MySQL 5.1 with his now-infamous Nov. 29 blog post trashing the company's decision to give the update a "generally available" designation.

Salesforce links Force.com to Google App Engine

Salesforce.com announced Monday that it is connecting its Force.com development platform with Google's App Engine.

SAP exec: Belt-tightening to continue, but business better

A top SAP executive on Wednesday said the company is "implementing a series of tough, tough actions to convert the company to a much leaner operation than it is today," but did not utter the word "layoff."

Oracle contributes data-integrity code to Linux kernel

Oracle has contributed data-integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday.

Forrester: How to squeeze your vendors

IT vendors may be growing increasingly desperate amid the global economic downturn, but customers must employ a range of tactics -- not just bullying -- to extract cost savings from them, a group of Forrester Research analysts said during a client teleconference Wednesday.

Filing: SAP co-CEO had concerns about TomorrowNow deal

SAP co-CEO Henning Kagermann allegedly held strong concerns at one point about the legal implications of buying TomorrowNow, the now-shuttered SAP subsidiary tied to a lawsuit filed by rival vendor Oracle.

SAP user group CEO leaves organization

Steve Strout, CEO of the Americas SAP Users Group (ASUG), is no longer with the organization, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

Fedora 10 out, packed with improvements

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project on Tuesday released Fedora 10, the latest version of the free Linux-based operating system, with a wide range of improvements in areas such as virtualization management, networking, boot time and security.

New IBM services offer cloud setup, 'validation'

IBM launched a new set of cloud computing consulting and implementation services on Monday, framing the move as something that could spark wider adoption of the model.

Survey: US IT spending forecast worst since 2001

Forty-five percent of respondents to a new survey from ChangeWave Research said their companies will spend less or no money on IT during the first quarter of 2009, the highest percentage found by ChangeWave since 2001.