It’s been nearly 20 years since Duffield launched PeopleSoft to help bring mainframe-caliber human resources software to PC-based systems. Now Duffield has turned his attention to the new high-tech frontier: on-demand systems. Next month, Duffield hopes to launch his new company, Workday, an on-demand business applications company. Sources said it will seek to create a new way to organize HR data and to make decisions, using the latest service-oriented architecture tools to link to existing software.

HP is unveiling a software package based on RLX’s Control Tower management software, which was the real target behind the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s decision to buy RLX. HP wanted to build up its capabilities of managing Linux environments on its BladeSystems platform, and Control Tower was built on Linux, said Scott Farrand, general manager of HP’s Control Tower products group. For example, the HP Control Tower package offers packaged open-source tools for easier use and integration.

SSA Global announced that it is teaming with IBM to deliver an end-to-end software and hardware solution to help small to medium-sized manufacturers quickly and cost effectively deploy a proven ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution delivered on a service-oriented architecture. The solution features SSA ERP(LN), SSA Global’s flagship enterprise resource planning solution, pre-loaded and integrated on an IBM AMD Opteron processor-based BladeCenter Linux platform. The bundled solution also includes SSA Integration for connectivity to SSA ERP(LN), IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM DB2 and the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. "With this combined hardware and software solution from SSA Global, IBM and our partners, discrete hybrid manufacturers can significantly reduce the time and cost of implementing an ERP solution on a state-of-the-art technology platform," said Graeme Cooksley, executive vice president, SSA Global. "SOA improves businesses’ ability to meet market needs and can help lower costs by encouraging reuse of IT assets and making integration of business systems easier," said Sandy Carter, vice president, WebSphere and SOA, IBM.

Intel is investing in Vietnam and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is due to visit this weekend, but the poor Southeast Asian country’s IT industry has a long way to go. Business analysts say that for the second time in a decade an array of foreign industries and services, including IT firms, have an eye on Vietnam’s highly literate, young workforce.

Users have been urged to upgrade to the latest versions of Mozilla’s software to protect themselves from a series of critical security holes. The Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned that earlier versions of Firefox, and other Mozilla software based on Firefox code, contain a clutch of vulnerabilities that expose users to attack. The Mozilla Foundation released a new version of Firefox last week, version 1.5.0.2, which it said contained fixes for several security flaws.

After Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems announced significant deals with Oracle in recent months, IBM is striking back with rebates of as much as $300,000 for software from the database giant. HP Chief Executive Mark Hurd announced broader software support and favorable pricing from Oracle in March–and got Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to endorse its Itanium servers with the words, "There is no more important platform for Oracle than HP and Itanium."

Acunetix has launched the Acunetix Web Site Security Center, a comprehensive Web site security information center that educates visitors on the latest and most threatening Web application hacking techniques. Web site security is possibly today’s most overlooked aspect of securing the enterprise. Hackers are concentrating their efforts on Web sites: 75% of cyber attacks are launched on shopping carts, forms, login pages, dynamic content etc. Common Web hacking techniques, such as SQL injection, cross site scripting, authentication hacking, CRLF injection, Google hacking and directory traversal are discussed in great detail in the Web Site Security Center, with information on how they work, how to find the vulnerabilities, and how to fix vulnerabilities so that valuable enterprise data and applications are no longer at risk.

Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. The Alliance, a coalition of organizations from across the world whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents, was launched on March 3 with 36 initial members, but that has now grown to 138 members worldwide. The Alliance is trying to promote and advance the use of the ODF (OpenDocument Format), which it says will allow the exchange of documents to take place without regard to the application or platform in which the document was created–both now and in the future.

A new attack aimed at computers infected with the Bagle virus threatens to generate scads of spam email campaigns, and anti-malware experts concede that the threat remains a major headache. Researchers at anti-virus specialist F-Secure, based in Helsinki, Finland, described the attack, dubbed "SpamTool.Win32.Bagle.g," and said it involves a new set of URLs being sent to machines infected with Bagle.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service says that Symantec owes $900 million in back taxes related to its acquisition of Veritas Software. Symantec said it strongly believes that the IRS’s positions are inconsistent with applicable tax law and existing regulations, and that it will petition the tax court to protest the assessment.