Oracle on Monday rolled out what it called major upgrades to its JD Edwards line of ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications during the Collaborate user conference in Las Vegas.

The Privacy Commissioner’s report into the alleged privacy breach of some four million Vodafone customers’ billing and call records has found failings on the telco’s behalf.

Oracle, which spent $US7.4 billion to acquire once-high-flying Sun Microsystems, has been losing prominent Sun technologists since shortly after the deal was forged. The acquisition was supposed to give Oracle control not only over such technologies as Sun's flagship Java implementation and Sun's Sparc hardware, but access to engineers and developers who were nothing short of celebrities in their field. But it has not worked out that way.

It is just on 10 years since Salesforce.com unveiled the first preview of its customisable online customer relationship management (CRM) software at the annual DEMO conference in California. DEMO had previously been the launch platform for ground-breaking technology such as Netscape Navigator, Sun’s Java and Adobe Acrobat, but attendees in February 2001 would have had little idea that they were witnessing something that would turn the world of customer management software — and enterprise software generally — on its head.