News

• Ellison, Phillips, McDermott to take stand in Oracle-SAP retrial

  During the upcoming retrial of Oracle's corporate-theft lawsuit against SAP, the companies plan to call a star-studded array of tech executives as witnesses including CEO Larry Ellison, former Oracle co-president and current Infor CEO Charles Phillips and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, according to court documents filed Thursday.

• Google says it had Sun's full support in building Android

  Google built Android using parts of Java that didn't require a license and it had the full support of Sun Microsystems in doing so, a lawyer for Google said in court Tuesday.

• Larry Ellison: Hardware-software integration key, Apple is best example

  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claims his company will continue to bet on selling high-end custom hardware for its software products, even amidst a growing trend toward roomfuls of cheap, generic servers.

• Oracle net income rises 18 percent, but hardware sales slump

  Oracle on Tuesday said third-quarter net income rose 18 percent to US$2.5 billion, while revenues grew 3 percent to $9 billion. However, hardware systems revenues sagged 16 percent to $869 million.

• Oracle reveals pricing for its SAP HANA rival Exalytics, signaling imminent release

  Oracle made a splash on Tuesday when it announced the general availability of its Big Data Appliance, but the company also quietly released pricing information for Exalytics, another new member in its family of specialized hardware-software appliances and a likely competitor to SAP's HANA product, suggesting that a general-availability announcement for that product is imminent.

• Ten IT news stories we'll read in 2012

  Well, we erred in our 2011 predictions in not repeating a 2010 forecast that Carol Bartz would be ousted as Yahoo CEO -- it was bound to happen, we just called that one too early. Then again, we also predicted last year that Oracle would buy Salesforce.com and have decided not to repeat ourselves this year, so we'll see if we were just ahead on that one, too. Meanwhile, these are our predictions for the next 12 months:

• Ellison unveils new cloud, trashes Salesforce.com

  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled a public cloud service that will run its Fusion Applications and others, and while doing so delivered a withering broadside against competitors, with his harshest words for Salesforce.com.

• Benioff comes out swinging at Oracle

  The Salesforce.com chief continued his spat with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday morning - and you might not see Marc Benioff at an Oracle conference again.

• Oracle, Google will hold third settlement conference

  Oracle and Google will engage in another attempt to settle their lawsuit over alleged Java patent and copyright violations in the Android mobile OS.

• 10 IT-related predictions for 2011

  We were wrong -- so far -- that Carol Bartz would be ousted as Yahoo CEO by the end of this year, but we were right that Apple's tablet, whose name wasn't known at the end of last year, would be huge. OK, so that second one was probably a given, but not all of our 2010 predictions were so easy. We think the same is true with our 2011 predictions.

• SAP rolls out wave of 'rapid deployment' apps

  SAP is unleashing a set of "Rapid Deployment" software applications that can be rolled out in as little as 12 weeks, the company announced Wednesday.

• Hurd unveils Oracle's latest mega-machine

  Oracle co-President Mark Hurd ripped the curtain off Exadata Database Machine X2-8, the newest incarnation of the company's high-performance data processing systems, during a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference on Monday.

• Hurd unveils Oracle's latest mega-machine

  Oracle co-President Mark Hurd ripped the curtain off Exadata Database Machine X2-8, the newest incarnation of the company's high-performance data processing systems, during a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference on Monday.

• Oracle revamps content management suite

  Oracle on Tuesday is unveiling Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g, a pillar of its sprawling middleware stack and competitor to products from IBM, EMC, Open Text and other vendors.

• Oracle staying mum on merger progress down under

  Oracle's Australian representatives are staying mum over the impact attempts to acquire Sun Microsystems are having on its operations down under.