Adobe will cut 750 jobs and reduce its investment in enterprise software as part of a broader plan to target the fast-growing markets for digital media and digital marketing products, the company said Tuesday.

Content management vendor OpenText is moving further into BPM (business process management) software, scooping up Global 360 for US$260 million, the company announced Wednesday.

IBM plans to launch a software framework that will help city and local government executives get a more complete view of how well their operations are running.

Enterprise content management vendor OpenText said Wednesday that it is purchasing business process management software provider Metastorm for US$182 million.

SAP saw revenue rise 27 percent in the fourth quarter but profits dropped by more than a third due to increased provisions linked to litigation with Oracle related to its former TomorrowNow unit, the company said Wednesday.

The worst CIO misunderstanding about service-oriented architecture (SOA) is thinking of it as only another technical initiative for software reuse. Although SOA's reuse potential is real and good, its business impact goes much further: In Forrester surveys, 38 percent of Global 2000 SOA users say they are using it for strategic business transformation. SOA's true source of power is in its business design models, not its technology - and this means that SOA provides a broad foundation for a much larger shift in business technology (BT) architecture that goes far beyond SOA itself. By correctly understanding SOA, CIOs can lead their organizations on a solid and well-managed path toward a strategic technology future and greater business value.

In 2007, NACCO Materials Handling Group (NMHG)--a manufacturer of warehouse trucks and forklifts--was using a manual system of spreadsheets and signatures to track design changes in its production line. Yet the company soon learned that its lack of an automated process was allowing for missed signatures, leading to some defective designs. Additional costs incurred from product recalls forced NMHG to explore a new option: a product lifecycle management (PLM) implementation.

"Companies that outperform their rivals are the ones which find the circumstances they want, and if they don't, strive to create them." Sitting in his sixth floor office, Ravishankar Subramanian, director IT and corporate services of the US$234 million ING Vysya Life Insurance, recalled the words of his superior at a previous organization. It made a lot more sense now.