Articles by Keith Regan

PeopleSoft said Thursday that it has commenced its offer to buy software maker J.D. Edwards, forging ahead with the US$1.75 billion deal despite the best efforts of Oracle to squash the merger. PeopleSoft put its new stock-and-cash offer into effect, offering each J.D. Edwards shareholder $7.05 in cash, plus a fractional share of PeopleSoft stock....

Oracle has upped the ante in its hostile bid to take control of PeopleSoft, boosting its all-cash offer by 22 percent, or US$1.2 billion. Oracle now says it will offer $19.50 per share for all outstanding shares of PeopleSoft stock, making the acquisition worth about $6.3 billion in total. The new offer represents a 14 percent premium over Tuesday...

It was the kind of day a relatively young, publicly traded dot-com dreams about when it's just a startup daring to dream. Netflix had come out the night before and said that instead of posting an expected quarterly loss, it would turn in a strong profit, its first ever. After-hours traders had bumped Netflix shares up 6 percent, and the people at ...

Microsoft has filed suit against 15 spammers in the United States and United Kingdom as part of a stepped-up campaign to work with government agencies and other Internet companies to can spam. The lawsuits claim the 15 defendants sent some 2 billion unwanted and deceptive e-mail messages to members of Microsoft's MSN service and its Web-based Hotm...

Microsoft has whittled the number of states appealing its antitrust settlement with the U.S. federal government to one, reaching a deal with West Virginia that will require the software giant to pay at least US$21 million in total to consumers, businesses and state agencies. West Virginia's decision to settle, which came just days before final wri...

Amid talk that U.S. adoption of broadband Internet access is about to slow down, Yahoo has forged an alliance with British Telecom (BT) to launch a co-branded broadband service in the United Kingdom. The BT deal mimics an agreement Yahoo inked last September with SBC Communications to market Yahoo-branded broadband service in the United States....

EBay has announced it will plunk down US$150 million to buy the remaining two-thirds of Chinese e-commerce site EachNet, which, like eBay, sells a wide range of items in both auction and fixed-price formats. The San Jose, California-based auction giant has held a minority stake in EachNet since last year The news propelled eBay stock past the $100 ...

The dot-com boom propelled few firms higher than Cisco Systems. Sparked by the proliferation of Internet-related companies, demand for its networking gear and switches skyrocketed. Cisco went along for the ride, churning out profits and sales growth and barely sweating competitors like Juniper Networks and JDS Uniphase. On the downside, the crash,...

Larry Ellison is by all accounts as charismatic and visionary as any other technology CEO. But he's kept a much lower profile of late than his counterparts All of that changed abruptly Friday morning, when Ellison threw a giant monkey wrench into the works of the business software industry. Oracle's unsolicited and, it seems, unwelcome bid to buy P...

Yahoo has fired the latest volley in the enterprise instant messaging turf war, saying it will work with WebEx Communications and BEA Systems to extend the capabilities of its Enterprise Messenger product. Specifically, Yahoo said it plans to add the ability to launch WebEx virtual conferences from personal desktops and to embed instant messaging ...

Despite a relatively strong first quarter, sales of personal computers will grow more slowly than expected this year and next, according to a report from IDC. The research firm said worldwide PC shipments rose 3 percent in the first quarter, with sales of US$42.2 billion, but what it called "limited economic improvement" forced it to temper its forecast for the next 18 months.

Given the pace of business today, instant messaging seems like a natural fit for the global enterprise, enabling far-flung employees and contract workers to communicate in real-time throughout the workday. However, many enterprises are balking for a simple reason: IM and other peer-to-peer applications can pose serious security risks. That point w...

Oracle Corp. has shocked the software world by announcing that it will set out to buy all outstanding shares of PeopleSoft. The US$5.1 billion takeover bid comes just days after PeopleSoft announced a major acquisition of its own. Starting Monday, Oracle will offer $16 per share for PeopleSoft shares, a premium of just under $1, or about 17 percen...

IBM and the rise of Linux are the two main competitive threats to Microsoft, CEO Steve Ballmer told employees in a widely circulated e-mail message In what amounted to a state-of-the-company note, Ballmer also said Microsoft will delay the release of its Longhorn software platform if necessary in order to release a near-perfect product.

In a bid to boost its often-mocked Trustworthy Computing initiative, Microsoft has reached an agreement to work with VeriSign to make Microsoft products more secure. The company also said it will train a new generation of security experts to master its software by adding a security certification to its existing training offerings. This move reflec...

IBM has announced that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the way it booked revenue in 2000 and 2001, making Big Blue the latest in a growing crowd of technology companies to find itself under SEC scrutiny. The company said it has been notified that the SEC has launched a formal investigation into "certain types of customer t...

In a move that significantly alters the business software landscape, PeopleSoft has announced it will buy J.D. Edwards in a deal worth US$1.7 billion. Assuming it clears regulatory hurdles and wins the blessing of shareholders, the all-stock transaction will create the world's second largest corporate software maker, behind Oracle. The merged comp...

AOL Time Warner and Microsoft have agreed to a far-reaching settlement in which the software giant will pay US$750 million to AOL to dispose of allegations it acted unfairly to monopolize the Web browser market. The settlement brings an end to the browser wars that began eight years ago when Microsoft set its Internet Explorer (IE) browser on a pa...

Ask Jeeves has sold its lagging enterprise software unit and has announced plans to raise US$100 million for a concerted push into the consumer search market, which the company said may include acquisitions. The Emeryville, California-based company said it inked the deal to sell its Jeeves Solutions unit to privately held Kanisa for $4.25 million,...

For a time, small businesses probably felt like little kids getting bumped out of line for the ice cream truck. They would jump up and down, money in hand, trying to catch the attention of software vendors, only to see those vendors choose to do business with larger, stronger, deeper-pocketed enterprises time after time. However, for a host of rea...