Borland Software announced its acquisition of Gauntlet Systems, a provider of emerging technology designed to automate quality assurance in the development process. Borland is expected to integrate Gauntlet’s technology into their next-generation ALM (application lifecycle management) platform and Lifecycle Quality Management solution. The combined solutions are designed to introduce and enforce quality and security standards earlier in the development life cycle without slowing down the process or hindering developer productivity.

At a recent conference, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison stoked speculation that the company is looking toward becoming a software subscription business. Ellison said at the Feb. 8 Credit Suisse Software Conference that licensing revenue "was an interesting number" but that "by far, our most profitable business is existing subscribers that renew their subscriptions every year." In a research note released March 9, First Albany analyst Mark Murphy, in San Francisco, said: "Industry contacts state that the wheels have been set in motion from the highest level at Oracle to do away with license sales within roughly 18 to 36 months, if possible."

Facing close scrutiny from fans, team owners and the worldwide media, Major League Baseball uses an online collaboration network built on IBM apps to ensure that the inaugural World Baseball Classic should go off without a hitch. Using IBM software that included its Workplace collaboration applications for enterprise content management, document sharing and Web portal development, the league said it had its first WBC-related operations up and running in less than a month.

CA on March 20 brought three of its desktop and server administration tools under the Unicenter R11 umbrella to provide an integrated tool set that shares a common architecture and agent. The new CA Desktop and Server Management R11 offering combines asset management, electronic software delivery and remote control into a single product that exploit’s CA’s common services and new MDB (management database).

A few years ago, we ran an article about installing the Notes 6 client. We honestly didn’t expect it to be particularly popular, because most of our readers were pretty high-level IT folks. But, suprisingly, we got a relatively large number of "thank you" letters about the article. Apparently, our readers were using the article to save time. It turns out they were sending the article’s URL to their users and telling their users to follow the steps, rather than making a "house call" for each new Notes install. So, now that Notes 7 is here, it’s time to update the article for the new release.

Read this DominoPower article.

IBM and its Lotus Software division announced strong momentum and investment in the mid-market, showcasing new products and tools to better serve the needs of customers and create value-add opportunities for the Lotus Business Partner community. The new offerings include: a new version of IBM Workplace Services Express and a hosted trial version of IBM Workplace for Business Controls and Reporting.

Just as the Novell BrainShare conference gets under way, Microsoft is claiming that it has migrated 3.3 million customers off NetWare and onto Windows over the past two years. The software giant has also launched a new program to lure customers in the education and state and local government sectors off NetWare and onto Windows. This battle underscores the larger war going on between the two companies for customers. Microsoft is aggressively trying to lure NetWare customers on to its proprietary Windows platform, while Novell is trying to convince them to move to its Open Enterprise Server, which it says protects the prior investment they made in NetWare while extending the freedom and flexibility of Linux.

Computer giant Dell plans to double its Indian workforce to 20,000 over the next three years. Chairman Michael Dell said there was a "fantastic opportunity to attract talent" in India. Dell is planning to open a new production facility in India, to add to its three call centers and two testing and development units.

Google says it will comply with a court order that it let the U.S. Department of Justice see a selection of its Web sites, but not the search terms the government also requested. Google says it plans to let the U.S. government examine a minuscule snippet of its stockpile of indexed Web sites. The company was ordered to do just that on March 17 by U.S. District Court Judge James Ware. Ware has given Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., until April 3 to hand over a randomly generated selection of about 50,000 Web sites that could be included in its search results.

Research In Motion announced plans to bring BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server-Small Business Edition v4.1 to Novell GroupWise customers in early April. The new BlackBerry server software is debuting at BrainShare 2006 this week and will be showcased by Novell and RIM. The new BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 for Novell GroupWise is a substantial upgrade to RIM’s secure, reliable and proven wireless server software. It continues to build upon the powerful and proven BlackBerry platform that delivers secure wireless communications and mobile access to corporate data with an unparalleled user experience. The new release makes it easier for organizations to manage larger BlackBerry deployments, further extends the platform for developers, and provides integration with Novell GroupWise Messenger for enterprise instant messaging.