SAP hosts SME awards

SAP America and SAP Canada named the small and mid-size enterprise (SME) Business Partner Award winners at its 2008 North America partner meeting, reports CNNMoney.

SAP presented the awards in Las Vegas during its 2008 Field Kick-Off Meeting, an annual gathering of the company's field employees and partners to learn about SAP's sales methodology, best practices and new developments.

Selected from the company's wide-ranging North American partner base of SAP Business All-in-One providers and SAP Business One partners, nominations were evaluated on numerous criteria to determine winning partners in each product category.

Intel released a set of modular-server building blocks for original equipment manufacturers and resellers to incorporate into servers designed for SMEs, according to ZDNet.

The worldwide offering provides the first set of building blocks based on blade-server design specifications released last July by the Server Systems Infrastructure Forum group, which is spearheaded by the chipmaker.

William Wu, Intel's Asia-Pacific marketing manager for server platforms, told ZDNet Asia that the set of modular-server building blocks is a "bare-bones system", with the finished server product branded by the channels, not Intel.

IBM is planning to buy Net Integration Technologies, a Toronto-based business software firm that offers business server software for SMEs, says All Headline News.

CFO Mark Loughridge maintained that IBM would keep on making acquisitions in software and services this year.

He said takeovers of Cognos, the biggest purchase by IBM, at about $4.9 billion, and Telelogic AB, is supposed to come to a close in the first quarter of this year.