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The article presents a calendar of events related to the computer and software industries for April to May 2006. The EMC World conference will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, where the company is expected to showcase its latest hardware, document management, and utility computing products. Linux will be sponsoring two conferences, which are the Desktop Linux Summit in San Diego, California and the Linux on Wall Street conference in New York City. The annual Oracle Applications User Group Collaborate will be held in Nashville, Tennessee. The MySQL Users Conference will be held in Santa Clara, California.

The article discusses corporate mergers and lawsuits. Lawyers have been fighting over one merger deal that probably should not be made"Oracle Corp.'s bid for PeopleSoft"it came to light that Microsoft Corp. and SAP had been in discussions early in 2004 to join forces, making the world's No. 1 and No. 3 software companies. The talks fell apart due to expected difficulty in integrating the companies and potential antitrust hassles"the same issues that are now dogging Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft Inc. Microsoft and SAP have been close partners for years, but that does not necessarily mean they would have worked well as one company. Microsoft has a way of totally assimilating the companies it acquires, with all traces of the original company mysteriously disappearing. But SAP would have been hard to swallow, even for Bill Gates & Co. SAP's software, like most large-scale ERP deployments, is hard enough for enterprise IT departments to digest. The combination would have been bad for the companies and bad for customers.

The article discusses news from the computer industry. Before it settled on People Soft Inc. in 2003, Oracle Corp. considered acquiring one of more than a half-dozen other high-profile software companies, according to internal documents presented in June 2004 in a trial to determine if the U.S. Department of Justice can block the People Soft deal. Oracle, in reaction to what it saw as an increasingly competitive IT market, was intent on making an acquisition that would make the company a serious platform competitor to IBM and Microsoft Corp., the documents read. In fact, in April 2003, Oracle's board of directors entertained a list of nine software companies, including BEA Systems Inc., Sybase Inc., Documenturn Inc. and business intelligence developer Business Objects S.A. Enterprise software provider People Soft, of Pleasanton, California, also featured prominently in the presentation, as did business software makers J.D. Edwards & Co., Lawson Software Inc., Cerner Corp. and Systems & Computer Technology Corp.

The article presents news briefs on the computer industry in the U.S. as of March 2004. Oracle Corp. said it plans to ship a new version of its Collaboration Suite messaging software late 2004. The upgrade will add instant messaging and other features. Oracle executives said that they remain committed to the software despite a small market. In another news, Red Hat Inc. reported a 43 percent year-over-year increase in revenue for its fourth quarter, which ended February 29, 2004. The company, which was profitable in the quarter, said it sold about 87,000 new subscriptions for its Enterprise Linux operating system. Meanwhile, the GNOME Project delayed an upgrade of its open-source desktop software from March 24 to March 31 because of an intrusion on its Web server. A member of the group said in an e-mail posting that none of the source code it has released was affected. The upgrade to GNOME 2.6 was put on hold to give systems administrators time to investigate the incident. Separately, PeopleSoft Inc. unveiled two customer relationship management applications tailored for financial services firms and universities.

The article reports that Oracle Corp. has released 14 software patches that address security vulnerabilities in its databases, application server software and other products in the U.S. As part of the quarterly software update, it also released a tool designed to ferret out commonly used default passwords that could be misused by hackers. According to Darius Wiles, manager of security alerts at Oracle, earlier versions of Oracle databases included well-known default passwords and usernames. It also features the Oracle10g databases that have been upgraded from its previous versions.

This article discusses developments in the U.S. computer and computer software industries. Portal Software Inc. will be acquired by Oracle Corp. for $220 million. Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sun Ray thin-client devices and application software have links to Microsoft Windows environments. A Network Appliance Inc. development center in Bangalore, India will be expanded. IBM Corp.'s Secure Blue is data encryption technology that can be embedded into microprocessors for data protection in pocket computers and cellular telephones.

The article reports on the move by Oracle Corp. to unveil a new transportation management application for its E-Business Suite 11i computer software in the U.S. The new software was based on the technology gained by Oracle upon acquisition of software manufacturer Global Logistics Technologies Inc. The Transportation Management software replaces two older Oracle offerings Transportation Planning and Transportation Execution. In this article, analysis and evaluation of the transportation software is presented.

This article presents news briefs related to the computer industry in the U.S. Due to its string of acquisitions this year, Oracle Corp. registered a 19% growth in its second-quarter revenue. Lawson Software Inc. and Intentia International AB have decided to extend the expected closing date of their union to April 30, 2006. It was in June 2005 that Lawson agreed to buy the Swedish firm for $480 million in stock. Last week, BellSouth Corp. announced its plan to reduce 1,500 management workers, or about 2.4% of its overall workforce.

Reports developments in the computer and software industries as of September 20, 2004 in the U.S. Plan of IBM Corp. to release some of its speech recognition development tools as open-source code; Launch of a set of software hosting and management services by Oracle Corp.; Introduction of two identity management tools by Novell Inc.

Presents news briefs on the computer software industry in the U.S. as of June 2003. Support given by Microsoft Corp. to SQL Server and FrontPage 2003, through aligning with iWay; Features of the OpenView tool from Hewlett-Packard; Lawsuits filed by J.D. Edwards against Oracle Corp., seeking to block the bid of Oracle for PeopleSoft.