Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, Joab Jackson

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 newest release of the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux distribution includes a number of technologies that haven't made their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) yet, including a new version of the OpenStack cloud platform, code-named Essex, that the company plans to adopt in future editions of its flagship distribution.

Fedora 17, released Monday, also includes the latest version of the Gnome -- version 3.4 -- as the default user interface.

The newest version of the Oracle NetBeans IDE (integrated developer environment) will come with support for the latest versions of PHP and C++.

NetBeans 7.2, released in beta form Thursday, will also offer the ability for users to easily deploy their applications on the Oracle Public Cloud, now offered as a preview service. Applications can also be uploaded to the Amazon Beanstalk service, also in beta mode.

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.

With the new version of Linux Mint, released Wednesday, the developers behind the open source Linux distribution have put all energies behind Gnome, offering two versions of the desktop interface.

One version of the Linux Mint distribution, called Mate, is based off the widely used Gnome 2 desktop interface. The other, called Cinnamon, runs a variant of Gnome 3, which offers more cutting-edge features, such as support for 3D acceleration. Both versions will be supported until April 2017.

Expanding beyond its scientific and engineering number-crunching software, Mathematica maker Wolfram Research released a desktop application for full-scale system modeling and simulation, the company announced Wednesday.

SystemModeler allows engineers and designers to create models of physical systems, using a modeling palate and a vast library of physical and logical components. In addition to providing a static model of the system being designed, SystemModeler also can simulate how a system runs, using time-lapse visualizations.

Taking a step into the social media marketing industry, Oracle is purchasing Vitrue, the two companies announced Wednesday.

Vitrue helps corporations disseminate their messages and advertising across popular consumer social media platforms, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and Google+. It coordinates social media marketing campaigns, analyzes the results and helps organizations interact with individual consumers on a more individual basis. The company offers these services though its own hosted social relationship management (SRM) platform.

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."

Besting a record set by Yahoo in 2009, the research arm of Microsoft have deployed a new technique for quickly sorting large amounts of data, called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS).

The researchers will discuss their work at an Association for Computing Machinery conference dedicated to databases this week in Scottsdale, Arizona. They are also implanting their data-sorting techniques in Microsoft's Bing search engine, where it could boost response times to user queries.