Teradata's acquisition of the email digital marketing solution provider eCircle highlights the accelerating consolidation of digital marketing capability into multichannel campaign management.

IBM's acquisition of Tealeaf will bolster its Smarter Commerce initiative, notably in the increasingly important mobile segment.

IBM’s acquisition of Vivisimo will add the enterprise-search work horse to its stable of big data technologies. IBM seeks to deepen its facility in blending data types in order to analyze the results or find individual records.

The acquisition of Gemcom International has helped Dassault Systemes establish its tenth product brand, Geovia. But Gartner believes this deal will have a greater impact on Gemcom customers than Dassault Systemes customers.

Progress Software will divest its application infrastructure and middleware business and focus on core development and application platform as a service. While future-oriented, Progress will still compete in a crowded market.

Vodafone's purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide could enhance its enterprise business and sharpen its competitive edge. But the consolidation won't necessarily be easy, and other operators can learn from its approach.

Google launched its long-awaited file synchronization service. Though consumer-focused, it sets a new standard for enterprises as Google's first offering simultaneously available to consumer and enterprise Google Apps users.

Marketo's acquisition of Crowd Factory is highlights the accelerating market consolidation of B2B lead management and social CRM.

IM and presence are central to an enterprise unified communications strategy. Clients with commitments to Cisco Unified Communications Manager, but not yet committed to a vendor for IM and presence, should consider this offer.

What Gartner calls a "fabric resource pool manager" is central to IBM PureSystems, delivered as an embedded blade appliance. But enterprises should look for proof points before standardizing on this immature software category.

Penn State's online masters degree in enterprise architecture is a milestone in the maturation of the EA profession and offers a practical alternative to certification programs for developing EA skills and credentials.

By buying Syclo, SAP would consolidate its direction in mobile applications. At the same time, SAP is moving to fill gaps in advanced presentation layer development by partnering with Adobe, Sencha and Appcelerator.

COBIT 5 integrates ISACA's governance and management frameworks and focuses on enterprise stakeholders' needs. As with previous versions, however, v.5 is not a recipe for success in and of itself.

Acquiring Wyse Technology will help Dell fill a gap in its product portfolio and round out its desktop services cloud strategy. For this deal to succeed, Dell must focus on relationships with channels and routes to market.

U.S. federal requirements for supply chain and procurement practices are shifting from tracking greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts to reducing them. Suppliers should pay close attention to this trend.

Positioned as a lower-cost alternative to the Oracle Tuxedo transaction-processing monitor, LibertTP will expand customers' options. But it must also compete in functionality and prove itself in real-life implementations.

Blackboard's launch of an open-source group -- and its acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot -- further its strategy to move beyond learning management systems and position itself as an education software and service company.

Monitise's deal to buy Clairmail, with its focus on technology partnerships, affirms that no one mobile banking vendor can provide all the technology, capabilities and connectivity needed to deliver mobile financial services.

Amazon's plans to buy Kiva Systems to better automate its warehouses and improve its fulfillment performance. But at $775 million, this deal must be more than simply a way to use technology more cost-effectively.

Ascension Health Alliance has formed a group purchasing organization and announced plans to expand. Healthcare manufacturers and distributors must prepare to serve this growing type of integrated national delivery network.

Radvision's video capabilities will strengthen Avaya's unified communications offering, Aura, but Avaya must resolve differences in deployment models and product overlaps to realize the acquisition's potential value.

Dell's planned acquisition of network and security protection provider SonicWALL will add products with varying strengths to Dell's security offerings. But rationalizing and positioning these products will prove challenging.

Marlin Equity Partners' merging of MCA Solutions into Servigistics strengthens Servigistics' presence in markets such as aerospace and defense, but signals the end of a stand-alone service parts planning software market.

Aerohive Networks has launched an Apple Bonjour Gateway that provides a plug-and-play, multivendor, bidirectional, wired and wireless capability. This will extend Apple Bonjour services to the entire infrastructure.

The acquisition of Brainware gives Lexmark's Perceptive Software unit intelligent data capture capabilities to augment its document imaging software. However, the deal does not significantly change Perceptive's market position.

Intel's launch of an automotive innovation center and connected-vehicle fund shows the company's desire to become a leader in the connected-vehicle ecosystem. It also exemplifies an expanding and shifting value chain.

Organizations that are still shifting from Microsoft Windows XP to Windows 7 should stay the course. Others should consider if the benefits of Windows 8 will justify deployment beyond tablets.

The proposed U.S. national privacy framework is a welcome step toward increasing business trust, interoperability and flexibility. However, many implementation challenges remain.

Amazon Simple Workflow Service offers application architects tools to build cloud-coordinated workflow applications, but not model-driven workflow. Benefits include an interoperable architecture for composite SOA applications.

Consumers will take interest in OnLive's new offering for editing Microsoft documents on the iPad, but enterprise leaders must ensure that users have proper Microsoft licensing before they use it for work tasks.

Enhancements to the next version of OS X, Mountain Lion, will lead to increased requests from users to employ their Macs on the job. But few of the disclosed features will help integrate Macs into enterprise infrastructures.

Sopra's acquisition of Callatay & Wouters is a sign of continuing consolidation within the core banking systems software market as competition grows fiercer.

The technology issues exposed by Google's misstep show how behavior tracking is moving beyond third-party cookies toward techniques that are more difficult to reconcile with privacy controls.

New U.S. federal guidelines for minimizing driver distraction don't mean an end to in-vehicle technology innovations; they emphasize an auto industry opportunity to create unique, intelligent human-machine interface solutions.

The move by Barclays into mobile payments augurs an aggressive play by banks to protect their territory from mobile operators and nonbank competitors, such as PayPal and Google.

The Single Euro Payments Area will be implemented by February 2014. As a consequence, insurers will need to adapt many business processes and IT systems and face significant investments.

Enterprises awaiting Windows 8 tablets with ARM processors will find good and bad news in the latest details from Microsoft. The tablets will have many iPad- and Android-like features, but legacy Windows applications won't run on them.

By acquiring Netvibes, Dassault Systemes gains customizable dashboards and analytics. Applying business intelligence to product life cycle management activities is the most obvious opportunity for Dassault Systemes customers.

The Mincom name will disappear, but the products will live on in Ventyx, an ABB company. Mincom customers will continue to feel the presence of Mincom's products and management team, with added focus on IT/OT integration.

Oracle's pending Taleo buy responds to SAP's planned SuccessFactors acquisition. Upon completion, the move would improve Oracle's talent management capabilities and further its software-as-a-service strategy.

Along with recent random audits in support of the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Minnesota case confirms that the regulatory "tightening" that Gartner forecast has begun.

Though M5 Networks' offerings will complement ShoreTel's premises-based unified communications business, ShoreTel must address important channel and platform integration challenges to leverage the benefits of this deal.

LeapFrogRX's predictive analytics will elevate Model N's revenue management capabilities by creating predictive scenarios for contracts and will have a dramatic impact on complex revenue management.

With a new name, Social Money Systems, and a new product that links banks, personalization and social capabilities, SmartyPig is at the forefront of social banking, an important trend emerging in online banking services.

Facebook's S1 filing in its initial public offering application reveals its strengths and weaknesses as it enters an escalated competition with industry giants like Google. Plan for increased demand for Facebook access.

NTT Com's plan to acquire a 74% stake in Netmagic Solutions illustrates the rapid evolution and advancing maturity of the data center market in India, and is a positive sign for organizations evaluating cloud deployments.

Kodak's imaging and print services business will likely survive its Chapter 11 filing in some form, but customers should exercise due diligence in purchasing decisions. Competitors will seek ways to exploit this opportunity.

The acquisition of TechTurn will build on Arrow Electronics' 2010 acquisitions of Converge and Intechra to establish Arrow as a major global IT asset disposition player, driving high-end competition in this market worldwide.

Proposed changes to European Union privacy legislation will likely prove controversial for many reasons. Organizations should consider their impact but not change business or IT processes until the legislation is finalized.

The National Retail Federation's 101st annual convention showed that retailers will invest more to improve customer-centric retailing. However, they still face the challenge of effectively adopting emerging technologies.

Microsoft's private cloud solution System Center 2012 collapses eight products into two, moves to a per-processor license model and makes Software Assurance mandatory. Start planning and budgeting for these changes now.

IBM's new membership in the Banking Industry Architecture Network signifies a critical shift in how vendors will compete, and in how banks should approach technology acquisition, while it will boost BIAN's maturity.

Former PayPal President Scott Thompson faces a huge challenge as he takes the reins of Yahoo. His early leadership decisions will determine the success or failure of Yahoo's course correction, which has proven elusive so far.

The acquisition of VelQuest extends Accelrys' reach into the regulated life science arena and strengthens its portfolio. Integration of architectures may prove to be a minor hurdle early on.

Cover-All Technologies' purchase of BlueWave Technology aims to build a more end-to-end component-type core system for property-and-casualty insurers. However, more is needed for Cover-All to match competitors.

360Facility gains Accruent market share in the corporate and commercial property markets and enhances its software-as-service offering. But the deal adds further architectural complexity to Accruent's product suite portfolio.

This acquisition deal signals a major change in application strategy for Salesforce.com. The company is betting that customers will embrace new solutions that use social capabilities to transform human resources processes.

Upon completion, IBM's acquisition of Emptoris will give IBM a robust suite of procurement solutions to bolster its Smarter Commerce initiative while improving Emptoris' prospects for growth.

A U.S. consumer advocacy group calls for mobile operators to beef up their mobile-commerce transactions' consumer protection. However, mobile operators lack the skills to manage billing disputes, repudiation and chargebacks.

McKesson will converge its clinical and revenue offerings on its Paragon platform, and halt development of Horizon Enterprise Revenue Management. It's a logical step, but it risks opening a large base of McKesson's customers to rivals.