News

• Download InfoWorld's special report on IT consumerization

  By now, IT has seen a stream of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and more enter the business. There's no stopping the consumerization trend, but IT can ease the transition and its own workload.

• Users: Oracle Exadata's speed comes at a price

  Few Oracle products in recent years have received as much hype as the Exadata database machine, with the vendor attempting to use it as a standard-bearer for a series of appliances that combine its software with storage, networking equipment and Sun servers.

• Oracle rolls out updates to JD Edwards ERP applications

  Oracle on Monday rolled out what it called major upgrades to its JD Edwards line of ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications during the Collaborate user conference in Las Vegas.

• Amazon Web Services offers one-click purchase of cloud apps from IBM, SAP, others

  Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced a new online marketplace that allows customers to buy software and services from a variety of vendors at hourly rates through its cloud infrastructure platform.

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  $500M state pension software system wracked by backlogs

  An expensive and long-troubled software program for California's pension system that went live last year has stumbled out of the gate, with some areas of service dealing with significant and growing backlogs, according to a report released Tuesday by officials at the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS).

• Epicor customer lawsuit may show danger of going solo on ERP software project

  Epicor is being taken to court by a customer over an allegedly failed ERP (enterprise resource planning) implementation, but the case may illustrate the potential dangers customers engender by embarking on such IT projects by themselves.

• AOL Unplugs 10,000 Servers, Saves $5 Million

  AOL decommissioned nearly 10,000 servers and saved itself $5 million along the way to winning an Uptime Institute contest designed to show the high cost of running inefficient or underutilized IT equipment.

• Sage rolls out subscription pricing for ERP apps

  Taking a cue from the steady rise of SaaS (software as a service), Sage is giving customers who run its ERP (enterprise resource planning) software on-premises the option of subscription pricing.

• Dell buys application modernization firm Clerity

  Dell said Tuesday it has purchased application modernization vendor Clerity Solutions, in its second enterprise software-related acquisition news this week.

• Old software blamed for city's failure to collect $17.6M in parking fines

  Traffic-law violators in Long Beach, California, have gotten to keep a little more money in their wallets, as the municipality has failed to collect US$17.6 million in outstanding parking violation fees due to an "antiquated" software system, according to a report released this week by city auditor Laura Doud.

• California scraps massive courts software project

  California's Judicial Council has put the brakes on a long-running, massive software project that was supposed to modernize the state's trial courts case-management systems, saying the software is viable but that there's simply no money to continue installing it.

• Gartner: Software-as-a-Service market to grow 17.9 per cent to $US14.5 billion

  Global spending on SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) will rise 17.9 percent this year to US$14.5 billion, according to figures released by analyst firm Gartner.

• What IT managers say to get the CIO's OK

  LAS VEGAS -- When data center and facility managers meet with the CIO about new equipment, the conversations are rarely easy. The equipment they seek is often expensive, in the six- or seven-figure range, and justifying the expense can be challenging.

• 'NoOps' debate grows heated

  The dust-up over the term "NoOps" escalated this week, with high-profile IT executives from Netflix and Etsy issuing dueling blog posts about the evolution of IT organizations.

• Microsoft plans Q4 debut for Dynamics ERP on the Azure cloud

  Microsoft is planning to roll out its first "cloud-enabled" Dynamics ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications by the end of this year, the company announced Monday during the Convergence conference in Houston.