Business

Oracle may lay off between 850 to 1,000 European employees, according to the French union CFDT.

Sydney breakfast radio presenters Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O have been given the title of “Twitter wankers”, accused of artificially boosting the number of their Twitter followers.

SAP users have begun measuring the performance of key aspects of their ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems as part of a benchmarking process agreed to with user groups. In April, SAP agreed to delay an increase in the cost of its Enterprise Support service, and to make future increases conditional on meeting certain targets for performance and customer satisfaction.

Microsoft will offer a multi-license "family pack" for Windows 7, according to a pair of bloggers who cite details in the end-user licensing agreement (EULA) of a recently-leaked build.

CPS Energy, the largest municipality-owned gas and electric company in America, needed to get a better grip on its budget and its budgeting process. Since CPS Energy was an enterprise SAP user, more SAP AG software was the obvious and lowest-risk way for CIO Christopher Barron to go.

China has ordered Google to suspend its foreign Web site search service after warning that the company's filtering of pornography was too weak, state media said Friday.

For about two hours on Monday, a big chunk of the technology world had its eyes focused on Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. And even with CEO Steve Jobs out on medical leave, Apple's execs managed to wow the assembled crowd and the tech-centric folks watching from afar with a wave of hardware and software unveilings.

E-books may have been a niche technology so far, but Google Inc.'s entry into the market could burst the online business wide open.

Point-of-Sale (POS) vendor Task Retail has cut days of data centre downtime by replacing its return-to-base support contract with an on-site service agreement.

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.

The business model used by Oracle and SAP is fundamentally flawed and will lead to their downfall within the next decade, said Technology One chairman Adrian Di Marco.

With many companies cutting headcount and costs to weather the economic downturn, Akamai Technologies President and CEO Paul Sagan wants his sales team to spend more time with customers, part of a bid to make sure that its content delivery and edge-hosting services don't end up on the list of expenses they consider cutting. At the same time, he said the recession will push some companies, particularly those in the retail space, to accelerate their shift to the Internet.

Today's datacenters are downright cramped, yet forced to continue absorbing more technologies and tapping into the latest trends, all while maximizing efficiency and reducing costs. The current recession makes now the time to glance back for a historical perspective to better understand how to not only survive in this different world but also to best prepare for the future.

What's holding users back? Potential security risks and a loss of IT control topped the list of perceived barriers to SaaS adoption. With so much trepidation in the air, Computerworld decided to get the real scoop, so we interviewed six executives who have tackled SaaS projects.

Ah, those wacky Europeans. They think nothing of stripping down and jumping into the Mediterranean in the altogether or, at most, those skimpy man sacks they call swimsuits.

Facebook and Twitter should join instant messaging (IM) services and block access to U.S.-sanctioned countries in order to avoid running afoul of the government's trade embargoes, say legal experts.

Will Oracle be good to Java's developers?

Industry titans Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are getting rave reviews this week about innovative new approaches to Internet search and communications, respectively.

Well, at least the issue is not unpaid taxes this time -- but Vivek Kundra, the brand-new, first-ever federal CIO after just a few days on the job is already on a leave of absence after the office of the Washington, D.C., CTO was raided by federal agents. Kundra had been the District's CTO before President Barack Obama appointed him the nation's CIO. In other news, Google peeved privacy advocates by announcing a behavioral advertising program and separately saying it is testing a new service that will transcribe voice-mail messages and make them searchable.

In sports, successful athletes narrow their focus during crunch time. They may concentrate on footwork, technique or increase their margin for error. Technology providers must do the same thing during tough economic times. You must focus on your customer and nothing but your customer, whether the customer is a consumer, another business, or internal departments needing technology and support.

Day Software may be best known for its CRX (Content Repository Extreme) Java Content Repository. But after testing the general release of its Communiqué 5.1 (CQ5) modular CMS, I think it's time to get reintroduced to the rest of what the company offers. This notable Web content manager will impress business users with drag-and-drop page design, in-context content editing, and a component library that includes Flash elements, form builders, and Google Gadget support. And it will impress IT with a nice complement of enterprise bells and whistles -- from integrated BPM to hot backup, disaster recovery, and clustering capabilities.

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.