AUSTRALIAN mobile credit software specialist eServGlobal has forecast that it can achieve an EBITDA margin of 20 per cent by 2011.

Microsoft on Wednesday is expanding its agreement to supply Linux support certificates from Novell, which originally was part of a controversial arrangement set in late 2006.Through the updated arrangement, Microsoft is committing to an additional purchase of as much as $100 million in certificates that its customers can redeem for Novell to support Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The investment will take effect November 1.As part of a five-year interoperability partnership forged in November 2006, Microsoft purchased $240 million of these certificates. Within 18 months, Novell has invoiced more than $157 million in certificate revenues, 65 percent of the original allotment, the companies said. Customers taking advantage of this arrangement so far have included companies such as HSBC Holdings, BMW, and Southwest Airlines, Microsoft and Novell representatives said on Tuesday.That arrangement also included a provision that the two companies agree not to sue each other's customers over any

TOUGH business conditions on foreign soil haven't deterred MYOB from spending $7 million on local web hosting company SmartyHost.

Handheld computer maker OQO showed off an Atom-based device at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, hinting at a potential design win for the chip maker.

The test program will let cardholders get near real-time alerts of transactions via text message or mobile e-mail.

Want to see how Chinese users are viewing the Olympics, and themselves? In China, Youku.com is where the online video is at, not that google-owned site with a similar-sounding name.

Microsoft said Wednesday it would purchase a further $100 million in coupons for Suse Linux support from Novell, furthering a controversial 2006 partnership aimed at customers who run both Windows and Linux in their server environments.

The purchase of a customer-service technology software provider is the largest acquisition to date for the software-as-a-service vendor.

Salesforce.com paid $31.5 million to buy out InStranet, which markets a knowledge base used by customer service call centers and customer self-service Web portals. InStranet was an AppExchange partner, which had provided its knowledge base technology as part of a number of Salesforce.com on-demand CRM deployments. - Salesforce.com, a 9-year-old company that has grown mostly from internal expansion, disclosed on Aug. 20 that it has acquired AppExchange partner InStranet, the producer of customer service knowledge base technology, for $31.5 million. InStranets knowledge base technology is used by business-to...

Hyperic's CloudStatus cloud computing management service is now capable of monitoring performance in the google app engine service, which customers are using as the foundation for enterprise applications. Hyperic currently covers Amazon Web Services and Google but could expand to manage environments for Etelos, Coghead, Bungee Labs and Morph Labs. - Given the rising popularity of software as a service in businesses this year, it's important that cloud-computing providers such as Amazon Web Services, google, Salesforce.com and others have a healthy ecosystem of supporters. Add Hyperic to the list. Hyperic, which bills itself as an open-sou...