software vendors

CA on Wednesday said it agreed to acquire privately held 3Tera. The acquisition lets the former Computer Associates move deeper into cloud management with 3Tera's popular AppLogic solution. The terms of CA's latest in a string of acquisitions were not disclosed.

A bruising third quarter convinced German software vendor SAP that it needed to take swift action. After license sales dropped 31 percent, the fourth straight quarterly decline, SAP started selling new kinds of contracts that are easier on customers' wallets.

The year 2009 will go down in IT history as a year of drastic budget cuts. But 2010 should see a software spending resurrection as companies in many countries increase their budgets and prepare for growth.

So says a Gartner survey that reveals organizations plan to increase their software budgets an average of 1.53 percent in 2010. Although North America will continue to see a slight spending decline, there is a clear growth opportunity in developing nations. Specifically, software budgets will rise 2.54 percent in Latin America and 4.34 percent in the Asia/Pacific.

To upgrade or not to upgrade? Enterprises may not have the choice they did between Windows Vista and Windows XP, when many opted to continue with XP rather than switch to Vista.

The move from XP to Vista entailed serious hardware upgrade costs, not to mention the soft costs of installation, training and support. If Vista offered security enhancements over XP, the benefits were more than overwhelmed by user dissatisfaction, upgrade headaches, and the cost.

Microsoft appears to have hit a home run with Windows 7. The launch event was well received. The software reviews are mostly positive. The memories of Vista may be fading away. But can Windows 7 live up to the launch hype over the long haul?

Now that the dust has settled on the introduction of the much-anticipated operating system, Windows 7 has to pass the performance, reliability and compatibility tests that spur sales and drive upgrades. With the complexity and cost of upgrading, Microsoft may still have some convincing to do before the enterprise market adopts the software.

The premium paid by IBM for software maker SPSS likely presages richer prices for tech-company deals as the pace of computer industry consolidation picks up.

Microsoft on Tuesday released two out-of-cycle patches to fix vulnerabilities found in Active Template Library, a set of software developer tools used in the creation of COM and ActiveX modules. ActiveX modules are commonly used in Microsoft Internet Explorer and are traditional targets for hackers.

Existing zero-day vulnerabilities are being exploited and are the main reason Microsoft released these unexpected patches, according to Don Leatham, senior director of solutions and strategy for Lumension. The critical-rated MS09-034 and moderate-rated MS09 patches aim to plug the holes.

Apple and Microsoft are grappling with bugs this week.

On Wednesday, Apple released an update to Safari. Safari 4.0.2 fixes two bugs in the browser's WebKit. The first bug fixes an issue with the WebKit's handling of parent and top objects that could open the door to a cross-scripting attack if a user visited a malicious Web site.

The second bug is a memory-corruption issue in the way the WebKit handles numeric character references. Apple said visiting a maliciously crafted Web site could lead to the browser shutting down unexpectedly or an attacker executing arbitrary code.

Businesses will have a chance to test the waters before diving into Microsoft's next operating systems, Windows 7. The software giant is inviting businesses to test their applications on Windows 7 during a free trial at Microsoft's TechEd Conference on May 11-15 in Los Angeles.

Microsoft is offering customers a chance to register for the Windows 7 Bring Your Own Apps Lab. The lab will be free to developers and enable companies to work with Microsoft engineers on specific Windows 7 compatibility issues, Microsoft's Yochay Kiriaty said in a blog post.

by Manisha Verma