Stories about: Sapphire

Golf balls run amok and ping around a warehouse in an amusing new DHL commercial. A distraught warehouse manager phones the shipping giant to reroute correspondence and packages, while a booming voice pledges that DHL has adopted a renewed focus on customer service -- a promise that will extend clear down to IT personnel manning help desks and scrambling to provide technical support.

Pity the poor, ambitious IT professional. With technology more important to the bottom line than ever, you'd think there'd be career opportunities up the wazoo. But the suits don't really understand what you do for a living. And they hold the keys to the executive washroom. So, while you're down in the server closet saving the company's bacon on a daily basis, these guys are upstairs in the corner offices with the nice view.

SAP plans to make it simpler for developers to work with NetWeaver in a bid to expand the appeal of the integration platform which is central to recent versions of the vendor's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

SAP AG is making a major change in the way it delivers ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications to customers, breaking with the traditional approach of upgrading the entire software release every 12 to 18 months.

Delivering on a promise made earlier this year, SAP has unveiled the first set of products to help businesses meet their compliance requirements, in addition to announcing a marketing agreement with Cisco Systems.

Software to be formally introduced later this year will link the Ruby programming language and the open source Ruby on Rails Web framework to Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 application development platform.

European aircraft builder Airbus SAS is implementing a Web services-based travel management application from SAP as a first step in a planned group-wide migration to a service-oriented architecture.

Andrew Nelson, president and chief executive officer of third-party maintenance and support company TomorrowNow Inc., isn't the kind of guy who appears to be surprised by the maneuvering of business application vendors for greater market share. His own company was acquired by SAP AG, the world's largest business software company, in a move to lure customers away from rival Oracle Corp.

Some business application vendors see it as highly fragmented, others as inherently complex. Donna Troy sees the small and medium-size business (SMB) market simply as "a huge opportunity."

Businesses that seek greater flexibility in running software from SAP and Microsoft together on their blade servers could be interested in new hardware from Fujitsu Siemens Computers (Holding).

SAP CEO, Henning Kagermann, said the company intends to remain independent and sees no reason to grow through acquisitions as its closest rival Oracle has done.