Technology Slice Blog

Salesforce To Compete With Oracle - Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) Chairman and Chief Executive Marc Benioff on Tuesday announced a database-as-a-service product that he hopes will take business away from Oracle Corp. (ORCL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), in a market estimated to be worth more than $20 billion. Benioff announced Database.com to a crowd of 14,000 at the company's annual customer meeting in San Francisco. Customers will access the product, stored on Salesforce computers, over the Internet as part of a trend known as cloud computing. "Databases need to be in the cloud," Benioff said, referring to the emerging market as a "massive" market opportunity. "You can use Database.com from any language, from any device." The news comes amid the rapid growth of cloud computing. Global revenue from cloud services is expected to grow 16.6% to $68.3 billion this year, and more than double to $148.8 billion by 2014, according to technology consultancy G...

SAP To Pay Oracle Billions - SAP AG, the world’s largest maker of business application software, must pay $1.3 billion to Oracle Corp. for copyright infringement by a now-defunct software maintenance unit, a federal jury in California decided. Today’s verdict is the largest jury award of 2010, according to Bloomberg data. It is the largest ever for copyright infringement and the 23rd-largest of all time for any jury award, according to Bloomberg data. The jury awarded the damages after an 11-day trial in Oakland, California. Oracle, the second-biggest maker of business software, sued Walldorf, Germany-based SAP in 2007 claiming its U.S.-based unit made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees and steal customers. “We are, of course, disappointed by this verdict and will pursue all available options, including post-trial motions and appeal if necessary,” Bill Wohl, an SAP spokesman, said outside the...