Agam Shah, Chris Kanaracus

Oracle may lay out how it plans to become a player in the burgeoning PaaS (platform as a service) market next week during a webcast event featuring CEO Larry Ellison and co-president Mark Hurd.

The company first announced Oracle Public Cloud at the OpenWorld conference in October. The Public Cloud header encompasses Oracle applications delivered as SaaS (software as a service) as well as PaaS features, including the Java Cloud Service and Database Cloud Service.

The TransferJet Consortium will show devices at the Computex trade show in Taiwan next week that wirelessly charge and transfer data simultaneously.

The prototype devices are intended to demonstrate new uses for TransferJet technology, which was developed by Sony for wireless data transfers and initially shown in 2008.

Dell on Tuesday announced a prototype low-power server with ARM processors, following a growing demand by Web companies for custom-built servers that can scale performance while reducing financial overhead on data centers.

The proof-of-concept server is code-named Copper and is the first one from Dell that is based on the ARM processor. Dell will not sell the server, but will install prototypes at specific locations so customers can kick the tires around ARM, whose processor designs are found in most smartphones and tablets today.

Dell on Tuesday challenged Apple's popular iMac all-in-one with the introduction of XPS One 27, which has the largest screen in an all-in-one desktop from the company to date.

The XPS One 27 starts at US$1,399 and has a 27-inch screen that can display images at a 2560-by-1440 resolution. The all-in-one has Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processors, up to 2TB of storage and 16GB of RAM. Users can select discrete graphics cards for faster multimedia.

Intuit's Quickbooks Online service suffered an outage this week that left "a small subset" of customers unable to access their data, but the company says the problems with the on-demand accounting software have now been fixed.

"We understand your time is valuable and we apologize," Intuit said in a blog posting on Thursday.

CIOs and IT directors tracking the barrage of major upgrades for Windows and Office also need to stay tuned to the refresh cycle for Microsoft's servers and tools, including Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Visual Studio 11.

The 2012 version of Windows Server, the version of Windows that runs on enterprise and data center servers, is "quite possibly the most significant release of Windows Server ever," packing hundreds of new and improved features in areas like virtualization, networking, storage, user experience and scripting, according to Microsoft.

Quad-core processors have not yet been combined with 4G LTE in smartphones, but that could change soon.

Nvidia on Thursday said a quad-core Tegra 3 chip and a third-party LTE modem will be used in the Fujitsu Arrows X LTE phone, which will come to Japan in "summer." A company spokesperson could not provide a specific date, and further details of the smartphone were not immediately available.

During the upcoming retrial of Oracle's corporate-theft lawsuit against SAP, the companies plan to call a star-studded array of tech executives as witnesses including CEO Larry Ellison, former Oracle co-president and current Infor CEO Charles Phillips and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, according to court documents filed Thursday.

SAP has already admitted liability for illegal downloads of Oracle software and support materials that were conducted by its former subsidiary, TomorrowNow. A jury in the first trial awarded Oracle US$1.3 billion in November 2010 but a judge set that aside. Oracle declined to accept a lower award, opting instead for a new trial.

Hewlett-Packard will trim 27,000 employees as part of its long-term restructuring plan, the company said Wednesday when it announced quarterly financial results.

The company will shed about 8 percent of its workforce through a combination of layoffs and retirement offers that started last Oct. 31 and will continue through the end of its 2014 fiscal year, HP said. Employee reduction plans vary by country.

Touchscreen laptops and tablets with the upcoming Windows 8 OS will be priced higher than their non-touchscreen counterparts, Dell's CEO said on Tuesday.

Dell will offer a full complement of Windows 8 products when Microsoft launches its new OS, CEO Michael Dell said during the company's quarterly earnings call. The touchscreen Windows 8 products will occupy higher price bands, which could mean higher profit margins for Dell, he said.

Dell on Wednesday reported a drop in profits for the first quarter, weighed down by a revenue decrease and slower sales of consumer products.

Dell reported net income of $535 million, down 33 percent from the same quarter last year. Excluding one-time charges, it reported net income of US$761 million for the quarter that ended on May 4, down 28 percent compared to last year's first quarter. Earnings per share was $0.43, compared to the consensus estimate of $0.46 from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.

SAP is buying cloud-based e-commerce vendor Ariba for US$4.3 billion, the companies announced Tuesday.

Ariba's platform focuses on business-to-business commerce transactions. It makes a natural fit with SAP's "broad customer base and deep business process expertise," SAP said in a statement.