Software

Oracle President Charles Phillips on Wednesday led off a two-and-a-half hour deep dive into the technology behind Fusion, hoping to put to rest continuing confusion over its project.

Hewlett-Packard Co. is extending its partnership with JBoss Inc. to support the open-source vendor's entire suite of enterprise middleware. HP previously resold and supported JBoss Application Server worldwide. As of Tuesday, HP will resell and support the complete JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) on a global basis, according to Christine Martino, vice president of open source and Linux at HP.

Salesforce.com Inc. went live this week with a heavily publicized major update, adding a new platform called AppExchange for easily deploying third-party applications to extend the functionality of Salesforce.com's CRM (customer relationship management) system.

Startup Centeris Corp. plans to officially release version 1.0 of its Likewise Management Suite software Tuesday. The company emerged from stealth mode in October with a public beta of Likewise that manages Linux servers in a Microsoft Corp. Windows network.

Microsoft Corp. has issued a patch for a preliminary version of its Vista OS for the same graphics-rendering problem that raised concerns about current versions of the Windows OS earlier this month.

Windows XP Media Center Edition OS may not yet be the standard home entertainment hub that Microsoft Corp. hopes it will be, but analysts said that could all change once the company releases the next consumer client version of the Windows OS later this year.

Citing customer demand and massive testing efforts, Microsoft Corp. released a patch last Thursday, several days ahead of schedule, for a vulnerability in some Windows graphics files.

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