Why did Microsoft develop OpenXML, how does it feel about negative market sentiment and does it see standards coexisting in the market?

IBM South Africa has emerged as one of the country`s most impressive off-shoring success stories. Its strong track record in the global market is helping it win deals in South Africa, too.

Bridging the digital divide has gone from serious intent to cliché, yet big things are afoot in Africa, where the divide is the widest.

Oracle buys Hyperion. Microsoft buys ProClarity. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) companies seem to be bracing for the business intelligence (BI) invasion. Present at a Brainstorm round table to answer some questions were:

Since its move to Intel processors two years ago, Apple has started weighing in as a serious contender in the high-performance workstation stakes.

Next-generation data warehousing is the foundation of HP`s recently launched Neoview platform.

In about ten years` time, servers will no longer exist, networks will link services together and today`s software functionality will reside in the network. Sound a little futuristic? Cisco doesn`t think so.

Jimmy Wales is most famous for founding Wikipedia. But before this philanthropic undertaking, he was all about the business.

Yeigo (`with spirit`) will test the cellular operators` love-fear relationship with voice over IP (VOIP) services.

IBM and Cisco merged maintenance services and announced in March that the new team would introduce "ground-breaking crises management services" - but not in South Africa.

CA has moved on from its chequered past. The company now believes its revised vision of reducing IT complexity will help companies achieve their goals.

Amid international criticism for the group as a whole, T-Systems South Africa has risen as a profit centre for the company, providing expertise to customers globally.

Neotel managing director Ajay Pandey believes the introduction of state-owned telecoms operator InfraCo is not necessarily bad news for Neotel.

Version three of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is now available, with a new focus on business alignment.

Cell C appears to be in trouble, but denies all allegations and claims it`s on track for exponential growth.

As a community, we`re really not that smart. We crowd into common spaces, travel alone and fight over the same spoils. What have we really learned over the years?

Avaya is a highly successful player in the ICT convergence sector. Yet, as a company, it has a very low profile.

When it comes to digital copyright, a senior professor at Harvard Law School has shown that he “gets it”.

Early computers were adjusted by hand to produce the results their makers wanted. The development of Cobol and Fortran showed that computers could be programmed to write code. Although programming became easier, its real challenges would only be learned ten years later.

Wits Business School will assist the government in throwing ailing companies a lifeline.