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Microsoft Skips September 'Patch Tuesday' After a Bug Is Found

Microsoft chose not to release a patch yesterday, citing concerns about the quality of the patch it had planned to release. The patch was slated to fix a Windows vulnerability that could potentially enable a worm to do damage to affected systems. However, late in the testing cycle, Microsoft discovered a problem with the patch, and decided not to release it on Tuesday, which was its regularly scheduled patch release date. Since it implemented the Patch Tuesday release cycle in 2004, Microsoft has stuck pretty closely to it, and the only other month that it hasn't released a patch was March 2005. "Occasionally, the testing process and our strict focus on quality can result in a month where no security updates are released, as is the case for 13 September 2005," Microsoft said on its Web site. The next batch of patches is due October 11.

ScriptLogic Bolsters Management of Windows Security with Security Explorer 5.0

ScriptLogic this week launched Security Explorer 5.0, a new release of its utility for managing file permissions and server security in Windows NT, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows Server 2003. With this release, the Boca Raton, Florida, company has augmented Security Explorer with a multi-threaded architecture that enables administrators to simultaneously perform multiple operations. The new capability to back up and restore file, registry, and file share permissions will help administrators in disaster recovery scenarios, while the addition of printer permissions management capabilities helps round out the product. Moving user accounts between domains, or migrating them from Windows NT to Active Directory, is also easier as a result of automation added to Security Explorer's "clone" feature. Finally, this release brings new logging and reporting capabilities when cleaning out permissions from unknown or deleted user accounts, which is expected to help organizations comply with new regulations.

Microsoft Partners with Unisys for European Payment Solution

Microsoft and Unisys announced a new partnership last week to develop a common European platform to help financial institutions better manage cross-border payments. The common platform, called EBA Link, uses Microsoft technologies such as BizTalk Server 2006 and BizTalk Accelerator for SWIFT to enable financial institutions to connect to Europe's clearing and settlement systems, including the Pan European Automated Clearinghouse (PE-ACH) and STEP2. EBA Link, which is currently implemented at financial institutions in Hungary, grew from work done by Interpay Nederland, a European payment processor located in the Netherlands, to clear high-volume, low-value payments.

Windows Gets Its Oracle Database 10G Release 2

Two months after it became available for Red Hat Linux, Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is now available on Windows, the database giant announced yesterday. The new release of the database brings several new features to Windows developers, including Oracle Database Extensions for .NET, which is a set of .NET stored procedures that enables developers to use the .NET language they are most familiar with, thereby reducing the time it takes to build and deploy Oracle Database applications, the company says. Other new features delivered with this release include support for the W3C XML Query standard for access to XML data (Oracle claims it is the first and only database developer to support this.), as well as encryption, clustering, storage, and development enhancements.

Oracle to Buy Siebel for $5.85 Billion

Oracle launched itself into the number one spot for CRM software in the world when it agreed this week to buy Siebel Systems for $10.66 per share, or $5.85 billion.. While Siebel has struggled over the past few years, the Bay Area firm still commanded respect in the CRM sector, an area of the enterprise application market that the company and its founder, Thomas Siebel, largely defined. Oracle, which has its own line of CRM software (as well as two other lines of CRM software acquired from PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards), gains Siebel's 4,000 customers and 3.4 million end users--a sizable installed base by any measure. The acquisition promises to be relatively quick and painless, especially compared to Oracle's 18-month hostile takeover bid of PeopleSoft, which eventually succeeded late last year. The Siebel board of directors has approved the acquisition, and Thomas Siebel, the chairman, has promised to vote his shares in support of the transaction. The acquisition does not require a vote by Oracle shareholders, and barring any unforeseen actions by government regulators, the acquisition should close in early 2006.

AMR Says Hosted CRM Market More than Doubled in 2004

In what could be a wave of the future, the analysts at AMR Research say that in 2004, companies ponied up over $400 million to buy hosted customer relationship management (CRM) software, representing a 105 percent growth rate compared to 2003. In 2001, 2002, and 2003, sales of hosted CRM software was steady at about $200 million a year. CRM was one of the few hot areas of software growth in the late 1990s, but sales of licensed versions of CRM software declined from $4.4 billion in 2001 to $3.8 billion in 2003. While sales rose by a little more than 5 percent in 2004 to reach $4 billion--and utterly dwarfing the sales of hosted CRM solutions--the question now is whether hosted CRM (as best exemplified by Salesforce.com will become the dominant way for companies to do CRM. Considering how companies have been traditionally wary of using hosted ERP solutions, it seems unlikely that hosted CRM will ever be preferred. The total CRM software market (including license and hosted software as well as services and support) tallied up to $10.9 billion in sales in 2004, according to AMR, up 10 percent from 2003's $9.93 billion in sales. AMR is projecting a more modest 5 percent growth rate for the CRM market in 2005, with sales of $11.44 billion.