Red Hat Flirts with Microsoft on Interoperability
Although it's not quite clear how much of this is being driven by public relations versus the real interests of customers, Red Hat seems to be trying to create some sort of pact with Microsoft around interoperability. Microsoft has many of its own strategic reasons for why it wants to link those talks to intellectual property patents, which is an issue that Red Hat doesn't seem to want to discuss with Microsoft as long as the company seems bent on bringing grief to the open-source community.

Companies Focused on Emerging Technologies Dominate eWEEK Excellence Awards
Providers of emerging technologies dominated the eWEEK Excellence Awards this year, with Skytide, SugarCRM, MessageLabs, Zimbra, EqualLogic, Left Hand Network, Shunra, Xirrus, Likewise, Finjan and BigFix all receiving nods of excellence from the experts at eWEEK Labs. But don't feel bad for Adobe, IBM, Lenovo (which was selected as the overall winner), Microsoft, Intel, BMC and RSA because they took home their share of awards as well. Why was Lenovo selected as the overall winner this year? Click here to find out. As always, proceeds from the entry fees are being donated to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America as well as to victims still suffering from the aftereffects of hurricane Katrina.

SAP Eats Some Oracle Crow
After vigorously denying that it had ever stolen any code from Oracle, SAP executives did an about-face last week and conceded that some employees have been overly aggressive in their zeal to compete with Oracle. In the meantime, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison appears ready to light up another cigar as NetSuite, the competitor to Salesforce.com backed by Ellison, gets set to go public.

Fifteen Reasons Why You Left Your Last IT Job
Once everybody gets past their summer vacations, odds are good that lots of IT people will be testing the job market more because of the intangible issues within their own organizations than anything as mundane as cold, hard cash. At least competition won't be all that stiff given the lack of support for increasing the number of visas for technology workers now that the immigration reform bill is stalled.

Merger Signals Convergence of Enterprise Search and Compliance
The move by Autonomy, a provider of enterprise search tools, to acquire Zantaz, a provider of compliance tools, shows that these two technology areas are essentially driving interest in each other. IBM is also in the act with an upgrade to its enterprise search tools as the tough questions surrounding data governance continue to move to the fore. In fact, this convergence may be a leading indicator of why CIOs need to rethink the way they think about their jobs.

Massachusetts Reverses XML Course Again
After all the ranting and raving, Massachusetts says it will now designate Microsoft's implementation of XML as an equal standard alongside the OASIS Open Document Format. Naturally, this is drawing some vociferous howls from the open-source community while others say Microsoft is just executing from the same old tired playbook it always has.

Dog Days of Summer Set Stage for Win-Win Conversation over Power
With brownouts and blackouts now part of our every summer experience, now might be the time for customers and IT services companies to come together on strategies for lowering power consumption. Speaking of which, it looks likes AMD will have its Barcelona quad-core processor shipping soon.

Time to Celebrate IT Independence
With a tip of the hat to Thomas Jefferson, here's a rewrite of the Declaration of Independence to suit the needs of today's IT managers. And in case you need to be reminded of some IT headaches that you have been recently liberated from, check out this list.