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SAP has appointed John Wookey as executive vice president to develop the company's product strategy for the delivery of SaaS applications for large corporate customers.

Last week Wolfram Research announced that it was entering the cloud computing field. Together with Nimbus Services and R systems, Wolfram is creating a service that allows users of the Mathematica product line to tap into additional high-performance computing, HPC, services in the cloud.

Japan-based mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo plans to acquire a 26% stake in India-based Tata Teleservices for JPY 260bn ($2.7bn), according to a report in Japanese business daily Nikkei, which said DoCoMo will acquire a 20% stake through new shares and buy the other 6% from existing shareholders.

SpringSource, the company that invented the Spring framework to simplify use of Java plumbing as an EJB alternative, has acquired open source company G2One, Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

THE National E-Health Transition Authority has eaten into its reserves as staff costs and administration expenses ballooned in 2008.

Sonatype is moving forward with commercial products augmenting the open-source Apache Maven build manager for Java, readying a repository manager and a product linking Maven to the Eclipse IDE.Headed by CEO Mark de Visser, former chief marketing officer at PHP tools maker Zend Technologies, Sonatype is set to release its Nexus repository manager in December and m2eclipse, to integrate Maven into Eclipse, in the first quarter of 2009. Sonatype was founded by the team that built Maven."In the short nutshell, the activity of Sonatype is to support an open-source project called Maven and Maven helps people build and release software," de Visser said.Both Nexus and m2Eclipse already have been available as open-source products. The commercial version of Nexus adds security capabilities. The commercial m2eclipse offering integrates with Nexus and offers "project materialization" for finding source code and tests for software development projects. Thousands of companies already use the open-so

Microsoft released on Wednesday an updated bundle of infrastructure servers for small business and its first-ever offering tailored to midsized businesses, and said the two would evolve alongside the company's software-plus-services strategy.Microsoft also introduced new financing plans in response to the sagging economy.[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]Under the marketing banner of WESS (Windows Essential Server Solutions), Microsoft released EBS (Essential Business Server) 2008, its first-ever bundle for midsized businesses, and Windows  SBS (Small Business Server ) 2008, which has evolved over the past 12 years.The WESS offerings bundle popular IT software in order to ease rollout and management burdens for small and midsized companies.The two bundles represent Microsoft's best attempt to date to serve the needs of businesses that have up to 300 PCs. WESS offers small businesses for the first-time options to deploy multiple serve

TEMPORARY skilled workers earning less than $100,000 will be guaranteed market wages as part of a major overhaul of the troubled 457 visa program.

PRIME Media Group has flagged the possible write-off of its entire investment in Destra, which called in administrators yesterday.