eBusiness

A new Forrester Research study that polled more than 200 SAP customers found widespread discontent over the vendor's recent decision to shift customers to a pricier Enterprise Support offering, and also provides tips on how customers can mitigate the increased cost.

In a development that would have seemed impossible two years ago, Google is cooperating publicly with Click Forensics, a click-fraud detection company with which it has had a rocky relationship.

Seemingly unfazed by the ongoing meltdown in global financial markets, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Friday his company will likely emerge unscathed, and in fact may "come out of this downturn stronger than we ever have before."

A Yahoo investor Thursday proposed that Yahoo sell itself to Microsoft for US$22 a share, according to a report from the Reuters news service. Yahoo was trading at $12.84 on Friday.

Opera Software, which is battling hard for market share with Google's Chrome, is promising users a faster surfing experience, an improved email client, and better browser-synchronisation capabilities, with the latest version of its browser launched last week.

A long-standing court test using community standards to determine whether adult content is criminally obscene has been a potential problem area for the US pornography industry. But a debate that's been largely abstract for years has recently changed as the US Department of Justice successfully prosecuted two Web site operators for obscenity.

As we get older, we realize what a surprisingly big part of our happiness simple fitness and health habits play. A growing number of sites help people to manage their diet, exercise, and health issues, and give them a way to rap with others doing the same. Following are the best health sites we know of.

With the advent of Web 2.0, news sites have changed, and stayed the same. "Social news" sites like Digg and Mixx let members aggregate their own favorite lists of stories, and vote stories up or down. Also included are some traditional news sites that deliver news faster, and in more compelling fashion than any newspaper ever could.

With about four weeks to go before the US presidential election, states across the US are preparing for heavy voter turnout that could cause problems for local elections officials and electronic voting systems.

Facing uncertain economic times, enterprises may be more likely to turn to cloud computing services -- such as SaaS (software as a service), Amazon-style utility computing, and managed service providers -- for the lower up-front costs, the faster time to market, and the ability to add capabilities quickly without investing in new hardware.

City West Water has reduced maintenance costs, eliminated paper based reporting and increased responsiveness with an integrated job management system and a new fleet of Next G handsets.

Back in 1999, Avnet's senior managers realized things had to change. A series of acquisitions had left the electronic components distributor with a glut of applications and platforms whose lack of interoperability was complicating operations. That problem stood directly in the way of the company's new goal of providing e-commerce services to its clients and expanding the company beyond traditional order management and delivery. Making good on the e-commerce promise required consistent results for clients, no matter where they might be or what channel they used.

Station Casinos' CIO and vice president of technology, Marshall Andrew, has two big reasons to be nervous this weekend.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing, Shop.com wants its Web site running as smoothly and quickly as possible. An hour of slow service could cost the Californian company hundreds of thousands of dollars, company officials say.

Burzin Engineer spends the entire year getting ready for three Mondays in November and December.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer delivered the keynote speech at his company's London conference "Technologies to Change Your Business: How Customers Are Implementing Tomorrow's Strategies Today".

With the recent rise of Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, it's hard to believe that just a few years ago, the tech industry, along with many investors, were taken for a loop when the dot-com bubble burst and many companies went under.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

For all the talk of businesses embracing Web 2.0 and social software tools, most companies are still at the very early stages of adoption, says Jonathan Yarmis, an analyst at AMR Research who focuses on emerging technologies. In his latest research note on companies taking their first step into social media, he says that companies must avoid the "Kumbaya Zone" - the place where social media is ultimately a time-waster and has little business value.

Google, which celebrates 10 years of its incorporation this month, remains strongly committed to its Enterprise unit and to the customers it serves, including IT and business managers and CIOs, although most of the company's revenue comes from online advertising.

Via the RISKS mailing list comes an interesting tale of poor online account management at a major online retailer. According to Graham Bennett, accounts with Amazon display an odd behaviour that doesn't seem to have attracted much attention in the past.

What if there were a way for you to directly help the neediest families in your community and the world -- or for help to find you, after a fire, flood or some personal tragedy -- without the involvement of a government agency, nonprofit organization or church? What if assistance could flow seamlessly, based on information routinely collected and resources instantly deployed online?

Like a Brachiosaur sinking into a tar pit, the recording industry as we've known it for the past 70 years is very nearly extinct. But unlike dinosaurs, the RIAA is trying to drag everyone else into the pit with it.

Business cards are as obsolete as fax machines. And like fax machines, business cards have us still using paper to move electronic data from one digital system to another.

Have you ever had a service or delivery person come to your home or business carrying a smart phone in place of a clipboard with pre-printed forms? You know, the ones you have to mash down hard when you write so all three copies will be completed? Outside of UPS or FedEx, I never have. But users of QuickBooks Enterprise can zoom their techs from the 1950s to 2009 with one of the add-on modules demonstrated at the QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions User conference last week.

The Internet is a scary place. Criminal malware lurks on legitimate and illegitimate Web sites alike, looking to steal your money one way or the other. Vendors have been scratching their collective heads attempting to make more consumers safer, more often. One of the results has been a class of anti-malware software that I call sandbox protection products. These items encapsulate Internet browsers (and e-mail programs and sometimes any other program you can run) within a virtual, emulated cocoon designed to keep malware from reaching and modifying the underlying host computer.

They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps -- Microsoft and Mozilla.org -- settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (e.g. Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)

The success of a BPM (business process management) initiative hangs on a good plan. Spend too little time developing a snapshot of your company's inner workings, and the resulting system of misfiring rules and unhandled exceptions will find you mired in costly troubleshooting. But, sure enough, you can also lean too far in the other direction. Spend too much time charting workflow definitions, control points, and exception management, and the delays will start whittling away at your ROI.

If you run a small service business and want a simple way to bill customers for your work, FreshBooks.com could be just what you need. This Web-based invoicing service is easy to set up and use, and relatively inexpensive: It's just US$14 per month if you have fewer than 25 clients. (For a higher fee, you can use it to manage as many as 5000 customers.) If you want a complete accounting package, however, you must supplement FreshBooks with third-party software at extra cost.

Enterprise search vendor Vivisimo is launching this week a version of its application that can more easily replicate indexes across servers, allowing users to complete searches even when one machine crashes, company officials say.