One of the biggest complaints we hear about many company Web sites, from customers and employees alike, is that it's too hard to find what you need. At IBM, with 2.5 million Internet pages and more technical content than any single entity, including the Pentagon, that's no surprise. A new IBM advanced information search and delivery system for the IBM support site (www.ibm.com/support) is expected to solve this problem. Code-named Digital Blue (dBlue), this project is a digital interface to IBM customers. The result of two years of work and five patentable inventions, dBlue is now available to IBM customers.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, more than 16,000 votes have already been recorded, as more than 20,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards.

A new Gartner Group report shows IBM expanding its number one position in the overall application integration and middleware market, capturing 37.2% of the global market vs. BEA's 7.2%. The third and fourth positions are held by Oracle with 4.4% and Microsoft with 4.3%

Yakov Fain reaches Lesson 11 in his popular 'Java basics' series. This time he deals with how and why Java programmers working on large projects that have lots of classes usually organize them in different packages; and explores the new element introduced in Java 5.0 called static imports.

Most IT shops recognize the need for applying Java technology. So what keeps Java from becoming even more prevalent than it is today?

In an acquisition that, combined with IBM's middleware portfolio, will strengthen its leadership in key on demand initiatives such as business intelligence, business performance management, business transformation, multi-channel commerce, RFID, merger and acquisition consolidation, master data management, and regulatory compliance, IBM this morning announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a leading provider of enterprise data integration software, Ascential Software, in an all cash transaction at a price of approximately $1.1 billion or $18.50 per share.

Although some folks were predicting a 'bloodbath,' the App Server Shoot-Out at Web Services Edge 2005 in Boston did not result in any serious injuries. Instead, Anne Thomas Manes, VP and Research Director at Burton Group, brought together representatives from a wide assortment of application server vendors for a lively panel conversation.

This year it looks certain that a new participation record will be set, as more than 4,000 votes have already been recorded in just the first seven days of voting, as more than 50,000 SYS-CON Media readers are estimated to cast their votes in this year's Readers' Choice Awards. Highlights after just one week's voting are as follows.

Jim Bole, Infravio vice president of products and services, will present at the Web Services Edge International Web Services Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts. Bole's presentation will examine 'Best Practices in Web Services Security, Service-Oriented Architecture Policy and Governance.' The conference will be held at the John B. Hynes Convention Center from February 15-17, 2005.

SYS-CON Media, the world's leading i-technology media company, announced that its 2005 Readers' Choice Awards polls opened today, February 1, 2005, and will remain open for six months, until July 31, 2005. More than 50,000 readers are expected to cast their votes to select the best software products and services of the year for Java, Linux, Web Services, XML, Microsoft .NET, ColdFusion and Macromedia MX.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that SYS-CON.TV (www.sys-con.tv), the first streaming live i-technology television is scheduled to debut on February 15, 2005 to coincide with the first day of the upcoming Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference Expo.

SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com), the world's leading i-technology media company, announced today that the first branded blogging community, www.blog-n-play.com (TM), will go beta on February 15, 2005, to coincide with the opening day of the Web Services Edge 2005 East International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edg e2005east).

Up to 5,000 Oracle/PeopleSoft employees are about to be fired. 'What's not known,' write Roger Strukhoff and Matt Vande Voorde, reporting direct from Pleasanton, CA yesterday, 'is how many of those jobs will be plucked from the sprawling PeopleSoft campus, which dominates the Hacienda Business Park in Pleasanton and is a major employer and economic driver in this region.'

Distancing itself ever further from arch-rival Microsoft, whose CEO Bill Gates tried during his keynote at CES 2005 to liken open source software development to a kind of modern-day communism, IBM will today be giving away rights - so it is announcing - to 500 of its software patents.

No sooner had we begun our reader-driven quest for the top twenty software people in the world than - by popular acclaim, as they say - we're going to extend the field to choose from...from forty to over a hundred. Here we bring you a sneak peek at the sixty contenders that we'll be adding now to the poll, with thanks to everyone who has proferred suggestions. Even 100 won't do this subject justice, but it will be interesting to see how the i-Technology community decides to rank them, when voting on this new, expanded group begins in February.

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge), to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005. More than 3,000 i-technology professionals are expected to participate this year including the show expo floor, making it the largest Web Services event of the year. The following is the official announcement of the keynotes, sponsors, conference tracks and sessions, tutorials, and the Web Services case studies to be presented during this year's three-day event.

Security giant Symantec, The New York Times is reporting this morning, is 'close to acquiring' Veritas for more than $13 billion, trumping yesterday's $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle, and dwarfing Honeywell's $1.5 billion bid this week for Novar. Only the possible $35 billion merger between Sprint and Nextel would be a bigger deal than Symantec-Veritas.

'While the stock market can be unpredictable, the technology running it can't be,' said IBM's software chief Steve Mills - Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software - this morning as Big Blue announced in New York that it's working with the New York Stock Exchange on a new order management and messaging system in support of the 1.6 billion shares traded daily.

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revised offer provides good value for PeopleSoft stockholders and represents a substantial increase in value from October,' says the chairman of PeopleSoft's transaction committee, George 'Skip' Battle. Says Oracle's Ellison: 'Today we announced both a great quarter and the agreement to acquire PeopleSoft. This merger gives Oracle even more scale and momentum.'

Once publicly free of the PC division, will IBM either buy, or form a close joint venture, with Apple - to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip? That's the question being asked by tech-savvy commentators who wonder what will happen next if Big Blue truly goes ahead and sells the division to the Chinese company Lenovo.

IBM is breathing new life into existing CICS, by adding support for Web services and Java applications, which utilizes clients' current business logic and IBM products already installed in IT ecosystems.

'Have IBM's stringent non-competes suddenly gone soft?' asks Maureen O'Gara. 'Usually an IBM guy has to take six months off before jumping to a key competitor,' she adds, whereas John Swainson quit Friday and was at CA Monday - yet CA and IBM are bitter competitors in a number of product areas, especially the high-end enterprise market. 'Maybe it's the first domino in a scenario where IBM buys CA out,' muses O'Gara.

Swainson: 'Let's start by defining 'on demand.' First, on demand reflects what our customers are doing with their businesses - streamlining their business processes to make them more flexible and adaptive to new markets and opportunities. They use information technology as a tool to integrate these processes, so obviously IT is a critical enabler of on demand.'

'We suggest you consider [PeopleSoft's] track record when evaluating what PeopleSoft's board is telling you now and in deciding whether to tender your shares,' states Oracle in a statement issued to PeopleSoft Inc. shareholders today. The statement adds: 'We look forward to closing this transaction quickly. The choice is yours.'

In a memorable discussion, Microsoft SOAP guru Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg - the 'Father of C#' - both paid tribute to Java last week at a conference in Canada.

After publicly retracting the results of J2EE versus .NET benchmark tests it conducted back in 2002, The Middleware Company (TMC) bravely ventured recently to revisit this minefield. From IBM's point of view, according to an internal document obtained today by WebSphere Journal, TMC has managed to blow itself up all over again!

My JSF article series and Meet the Experts appearance on IBM developerWorks received a lot of feedback. I would have to say, the most common question or feedback came along the lines of comparing Struts to JSF.

Making itself the first app server to deliver this type of simultaneous detection and recovery capability together, WebSphere Application Server Version 6, when it becomes available before the end of the year - says IBM - will 'help protect Internet business applications built on it, from a mortgage processing system to an automaker's supply chain application, with advanced autonomic computing capabilities from IBM.'

Jack Martin, editor-in-chief of WebSphere Journal, recently sat down with Bruce Radloff, CTO of OnStar, and Tony Lent, vice president of OnStar's Wireless Strategic Business Unit, to talk about how they use WebSphere.

With better technologies, new architectures, and innovative ways of thinking about old problems, there are new applications for business intelligence and data analysis. I am talking about the power of the intelligent portal.

Spooked at the thought of an Oracle-PeopleSoft combination to the point of considering playing white knight, IBM has now allied directly with PeopleSoft, getting it to promise to standardize its applications on IBM's WebSphere middleware.

Last month, Jack Martin, editor-in-chief of WebSphere Journal, and Tom Inman, vice president of product management and marketing, IBM WebSphere Software, talked about the differences between WebSphere and WebLogic. This month, they look at what's happening in WebSphere now and in the future - and review briefly the open-source competition, such as would-be alternatives like JBoss and Apache Geronimo.

With a customer roster that includes Fortune 500 companies like Citibank, Verizon, JP Morgan, and medium-sized shops like Spectra Marketing, Viador - provider of reporting and OLAP analysis tools for customers that need to do reporting and analyze their data such as financial analysis - also has a very strong presence in China. 'We are one of the largest business intelligence tools companies in China right now in terms of the support infrastructure,' Viador CTO Dave Lai tells Jack Martin. Read on for more about IT in China, the differences between WebSphere and WebLogic, and the up and coming role of Linux.

Look at it this way, saying 'surfacing' is an improvement over saying 'portalizing'! Just in case this is your first time hearing either term, they have identical definitions: bringing the data to the top most layer of the system. If you think about your development experience, you've probably been surfacing applications for years now.

SYS-CON Media is inviting BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss, JOnAS, Macromedia, Microsoft, Oracle, Orion, Sun, and Sybase to an 'Application Server Shoot-Out' at the upcoming Web Services Edge Conference & Expo, in Boston next February. The shootout will be a live competition aimed at finding out which app servers support the latest WS-I standards and how they compare in terms of how many transactions they can handle, how many lines of code they require, how they react to simulated network and hardware failures and a whole range of other metrics.

How low does BEA have to go before Oracle or, for that matter, anyone makes an offer for BEA? The answer may be lower than you think. Someone, anyone buying BEA has been a perennial topic of conversation for the past couple of years.

Jack Martin, editor-in-chief of WebSphere Journal, recently spent some time chatting with Tom Inman, vice president of product management and marketing, IBM WebSphere Software, about WebSphere's market share relative to BEA's WebLogic, how IBM handles WebSphere sales, its customer and partner programs, and its plans for the future. This month, WJ offers part 1 of this interview, on market share and BEA.

Jack Martin speaks to Devi Gupta, director of Strategic Marketing at Prolifics, about IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic.

Jack Martin also spoke to George Kosmides, president of Noospherics, about their IBM relationship.

The May issue of Java Developer's Journal (Vol. 9, issue 5), scooped the annual Gartner/Dataquest Report six weeks before it was published and asked the question, 'How Long Can BEA Survive Against IBM?' The day after the report came out, BEA announced its quarterly earnings and its stock had dropped 23%.