Stories about: PeopleSoft

SAP users say the debate over the vendor's recent decision to force all customers onto enterprise support is far from over and they want SAP to back up its claims about the service's added benefits with hard data.

Oracle on Monday filed an amended complaint in its ongoing lawsuit against SAP, charging that top executives bought SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary even while knowing it had an "illegal" business model.

SAP plans to close its TomorrowNow software maintenance subsidiary by Oct. 31, having failed to find a buyer for the company. It will help TomorrowNow's 225 customers to find new support providers before the company closes its doors, it announced Monday.

It's no secret that maintenance and support for enterprise applications is wildly profitable for vendors and, likewise, incredibly expensive for IT shops. Some of those IT shops, in fact, are overwhelmed by the cost and find too little return to justify paying for it.

Mobility and software as a service are changing customer relationship management and sales force software. Upstart Salesforce.com has made a significant dent in the market, and established vendors of licensed software are playing catchup. SAP AG's recent alliance with Research in Motion Inc. is the latest development as CRM vendors try to meet customer growing demand for mobility. And user interfaces are evolving to meet the expectations of people who have grown up with the Web.

Oracle will release 45 critical security fixes on Tuesday, the company announced Thursday.

In many ways, managing a developer is just like managing any other employee. Developers want managers who'll help them solve business and technical problems, who'll protect them from unnecessary office politics and who will help them meet their personal career goals. But programmers are...different. Like musicians, these creative folks can alternate between big-picture thinking and persnickety detail in a heartbeat. They can be sidetracked by silly toys, and convinced to work overtime by the promise of pizza and a T-shirt. Trying to understand and motivate these people can drive managers-particularly nontechnical managers-to distraction.

Attorneys representing Oracle in the company's lawsuit against rival SAP and its TomorrowNow subsidiary have for the first time publicly put a dollar figure -- "likely" $1 billion or more -- on the damages they believe the enterprise software maker deserves.

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.

Oracle released 41 security fixes for its flagship database and several other products Tuesday, including 15 patches for vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely without a username or password.

Oracle will release patches for a slew of products next week, including fixes for two nasty vulnerabilities for its database software.