Most vendors must guess what customers want to buy, and how they'll use it. For IBM, however, with about 400,000 employees, it has the potential to be its own best laboratory, one that becomes even more potent when mixed with active participation in open-source communities.

That potential, as I discovered in an interview on Friday with Jeff Schick, IBM's vice president of social software, isn't a "gimme," but is powerful if you can enable the right sort of corporate culture and processes.

F...

I was somewhat shocked by the stellar results Oracle recently reported, considering the sorry state of the economy. I even called an analyst friend to find out if maybe there was some house of cards ala Computer Associated that explained the consistent rise in revenue and margin. But I was reminded of two simple facts explaining why Oracle remains dominant:

1. Applications drive database sales
2. Oracle owns pretty much everything

Oracle's acquisition streak has given the company an enormous bre...

The storage software industry has seen its first quarterly sales decline after more than five years of solid growth, according to a report from market researcher IDC.

First-quarter 2009 revenue for the industry sank 5.2 percent to $2.8 billion from the previous year. The slump has impacted several key vendors, including Hewlett-Packard, EMC, and IBM, all of which sell storage software to enterprise clients.

"The combination of the normally slow first quarter for most companies with the contin...