Chris Kanaracus, Eric Lai, IDG News Service

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.

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.

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.

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.

CIOs face a common set of thorny challenges these days, namely the pressure to deliver innovations even as they seek to cut or hold down spending, according to an array of senior IT executives who spoke on Tuesday at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"IT is a business within a business," said Tom Sanzone, senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton and a former CIO at Credit Suisse, during a panel discussion. "It should be run that way."

Salesforce.com, which has placed ample emphasis on its Chatter social networking application, will actually begin providing real-time chat functionality as part of an imminent upgrade to its family of cloud-based software, according to a company document.

Chatter Messenger will be generally available as part of the upcoming Summer '12 launch of Salesforce.com's CRM (customer relationship management) software, according to release notes that have already been uploaded to the company's website.

SAP seems to be betting its future on its HANA in-memory database, spotlighting the technology once again at the Sapphire conference in Orlando Wednesday, announcing a slew of new applications, partnerships and functional enhancements for the system.

Thanks to a "shopping spree" by SAP in recent years, the company has been able to surround HANA with a wide variety of important supporting tools, co-founder Hasso Platter said during a keynote address Wednesday, which was webcast. "We have enriched the system. We think that technically, we have a pretty complete collection of functionality."

NetSuite is going up against vendors such as Demandware in the market for cloud-based e-commerce platforms, announcing a new product, SuiteCommerce, during the SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

While NetSuite has offered e-commerce technologies for some time, this product aims to up the ante and replace first-generation e-commerce platforms, which largely revolve around purchases made through company websites.

SAP announced a broad set of plans to become a player in cloud computing, spanning from a "loosely coupled suite" of business applications to data integration and PaaS (platform as a service) Tuesday during the Sapphire conference in Orlando.

The conference comes several months after SAP's US$3.4 billion acquisition of SuccessFactors, a move that gave it a large set of cloud-based HCM (human capital management) software as well as what executives called "cloud DNA," or expertise running such businesses.

SAP on Monday unveiled a series of mobile applications covering areas such as expense management and e-learning, as well as improved support for iOS and Android devices. The announcements came at the start of the vendor's Sapphire conference in Orlando.

One of the new mobile applications aims to tackle the "necessary evil" of travel expense reporting. It allows workers to fill out expenses while on the go, rather than waiting to do an entire batch later, SAP said.

SAP has certified its Business All-in-One ERP (enterprise resource planning) application for cloud-based deployments on Amazon Web Services, the companies announced Friday.

The certification applies to both Windows and Linux-based AWS instances, according to the announcement.