News.com has this story on the crowded application server market. The article talks about a study from the International Data Corporation (IDC), which says that Oracle, Sun, Apple Computer, and Allaire had the most revenue in the application server market last year.

Here’s a report from TechWeb, which says that Cisco Systems has government approval to buy IBM’s network business.

The Customer Relationship Company has a suite of proprietary customer relationship management (CRM) applications utilizing Lotus Development Corp. technology. Affina has fully integrated the Lotus Notes/Domino technology with its automated call distributors; e-mail management system; e-commerce and Web-enabled services; Data Warehouse reporting system; dealer locator and mapping applications; electronic library search functions; and custom fulfillment system.

Bowstreet announced that 20 technology companies will support Directory Services Markup Language (DSML). DSML uses Extensible Markup Language (XML), the Internet’s lingua franca for commerce, to enable different vendors’ directories to interoperate, unlocking information about people and computing resources in a form convenient for business-to-business e-commerce applications. DSML 1.0, however, is only a document format. It is not an application program interface or network access protocol.

Nokia Intelligent Applications (formerly Telekol Corporation) brings to market in its latest release of the IntegraX server. Three major components of this release include unified messaging for Lotus Notes, speech recognition capability, and multilingual support for voice prompts and text-to-speech-based applications.

Percussion Software introduced Percussion XSpLit, a free utility for converting HTML into XML and XSL. With XSpLit, developers can create the XML and XSL equivalents of their HTML pages without writing the pages by hand.

WebTrends released WebTrends Enterprise Suite 4.0 and announced new versions of WebTrends Enterprise Suite for Lotus Domino, and WebTrends Professional Suite. Also announced is a new version of the popular web traffic reporting product, WebTrends Log Analyzer.

Here’s an article from PC Week which says that IBM will release a new content management suite and add additional database support to its information portal. The article says that this should happen next year.

News.com says that Sun Microsystems is withdrawing its effort to turn Java into an industry standard.

News.com reports that Oasis, a consortium of tech firms, is working with a United Nations organization to develop a standard for Extensible Markup Language (XML).