Stacy Cowley

IBM Corp. has announced a new line of chips intended to support Internet appliances

E-business infrastructure software maker Peregrine Systems Inc. has agreed to buy rival Remedy Corp. in a cash and stock deal valued at more than US$1 billion, the companies said Monday.

Businesses view the Internet as a key component in their purchasing plans, but many are dissatisfied with their suppliers' on-line capabilities, and less than 10 per cent say the Internet has dramatically changed their procurement procedures, according to the latest edition of the National Association of Purchasing Management/Forrester Research Inc. "Report on eBusiness" (available on-line at http://www.napm.org/).

In his speech on Tuesday at New York University Free Software Foundation creator and architect of the GNU Project Richard Stallman came out swinging at Microsoft excutive Craig Mundie who grabbed headlines earlier this month blasting open source software.

IBM unveiled Project eLiza, a multi-year, multi-billion dollar initiative intended to make worldwide computing networks as easy to use as toasters.

Worldwide spending on IS (information systems) outsourcing will top US$100 billion by 2005, up from $56 billion in 2000, according to a recently released report from market researcher International Data Corp. (IDC).

Venezuela-based Banco Mercantil has recently completed the first phase of a project replacing 30 Microsoft Corp. Windows NT servers with a single IBM Corp. mainframe running Linux, the companies plan to announce on Thursday. The project is one of the first announced Linux deployments by a large financial institution, and Banco Mercantil is among the first Latin American enterprises to adopt Linux, according to IBM.

Microsoft Corp.'s plan to alter the way it licenses software to large corporate users is an attempt to increase and stabilize license sales revenue, according to analysts.