SAP’s address Fieldglass extends SuccessFactors’ HR reach to contingent workers and Ariba procurement to labor and services. SAP announced on Wednesday the planned acquisition of Fieldglass, which supplies a cloud-based vendor management system for procuring and managing contingent labor and services. The deal complements SAP’s cloud-based SuccessFactors human resources applications and its Ariba procurement network. The deal positions SAP to aid companies “manage their entire workforce — both temporary and permanent staff — from initial recruiting and on-boarding to ongoing development, performance management, retention, and retirement,” SAP said in an announcement. [Want more on SAP’s cloud plans? Read Can SAP Master Cloud & On-Premises?] Based in Chicago, the 14-year-old Fieldglass has greater than 250 corporate customers starting from AIG and American Airlines to Johnson & Johnson and Verizon. The job descriptions range from lawyers, PR specialists, developers, and engineers to flight attendants, cashiers, clerical workers, and cooks. Managing contracts and statement-of-work services is attending to be a huge business; companies now spend $3.3 trillion annually... Read More »

SOASTA gained experience within the London and Vancouver Olympics; its cloud-based testing will shape the subsequent 10 years of Olympics IT. Sochi Olympics 2014: 10 Technologies In Spotlight (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Testing to bypass failure is a challenge of Olympic proportions. Just ask SOASTA, which has committed for the subsequent 10 years to check the readiness of the International Olympic Committee’s ticketing and seat selection applications, in addition to overall website operations. The Mountain View, Calif., firm announced Tuesday a ten-year contract to function the appliance tester for the International Olympic Committee’s IT operations. It is a subcontractor to general contractor Atos, a 74,000-employee French firm also under a protracted-term contract to produce IT services, as it’s currently doing in Sochi, Russia. “We’re already in conversations with Tokyo,” the positioning of the 2020 Summer Olympics, said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA. He said SOASTA will join Atos to establish IT operations for the 2016 Summer Games in Brazil and the 2018... Read More »

Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR should consider rewarding its Kickstarter backers with something greater than a T-shirt. Facebook’s decision to obtain Oculus VR on the way to connect social networking with virtual reality hasn’t gone over well with the Kickstarter members who backed the startup. Comments from Kickstarter participants had been predominantly negative, with backers saying they feel sickened, betrayed, saddened, and disappointed. Similar sentiment dominates discussions of the deal on Reddit — a lot in order that Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey bothered to reply. “i’m sorry that you’re disappointed,” Luckey wrote. “To be honest, if I were you, i’d probably have an analogous initial impression! There are lots of of the explanation why this can be a great point, a lot of which aren’t yet public. lots of people obviously feel a similar way you do.” [Whom does Oculus take part the Facebook “family”? Read Facebook Oculus Deal: 5 Older Siblings.] Luckey defended the explanation for selling his company, and only... Read More »

Upstart enterprise opens sixth datacenter, plans for brand new UK facility and more developer tools. Top 10 Cloud Fiascos (Click image for larger view.) Developer-friendly DigitalOcean is expanding into Asia with a brand new cloud datacenter opening in Singapore Tuesday. It should serve developers in Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, in step with founder Mitch Wainer. DigitalOcean will fan the flames of 150 servers in a brand new Equinix facility in Singapore to get its Asia/Pacific region going. Wainer said those five racks can be only a start if DigitalOcean follows the pattern of rapidly adding more developer accounts, because it has in North America and Europe. It has an option with Equinix for more room within the same site. At the beginning of 2013, DigitalOcean had 2,000 users and was just commencing to gain a flood of Ruby developers that might boost its server count from 100 to 7,000 by July. As of last week, it had 163,000 active accounts and was expanding... Read More »

Some of you do not need to claim goodbye to Windows XP to any extent further than you desired to retire the Atari. But support ends on April 8: We break down your best upgrade options. You’ve held out decades, brave Windows XP user. Maybe you joined the XP game in 2007, while you steered away from Windows Vista. Or even you have been using XP for the reason that operating system debuted the entire long ago in 2001, when lots of today’s youngest Microsoft employees weren’t even in highschool. Security experts have chided your hesitancy to upgrade. Microsoft, that is now tempting XP users with $100 off Windows 8.1 devices, was practically begging you to maneuver along. Your PC takes 10 minutes in addition up. It is dependent upon components which can be outclassed by what’s inside your average smartphone, not to mention the newest PCs. But you’ve remained unmoved by these bells and whistles. Let’s give credit where it’s due: In an age... Read More »