ReadWriteEnterprise

Factiva, the gated business news service from Dow Jones, is getting a facelift and some new enhancements this month. A new iPad app is now available that makes it easier to retrieve information in nine different languages. There is more content and news from social media sources. The enhancements bring nearly 600 continuously updated news feeds to the service, including the Dow Jones, Reuters and AP news wires. Users can search for same-day coverage of major newspapers and read transcripts of various TV and radio news broadcasts.

Jive Software, the company that has been one of the leaders in collaboration software, has acquired OffiSync, the company that makes social media add-ons to Microsoft Outlook. You gotta love a company that starts out its corporate overview by saying "old business processes and technologies suck" right on its website.

Today Software AG announced its acquisition of Terracotta, the sponsor of the open source distributed data cache for Java applications called Ehcache. Terracotta claims that Ehcache is the most widely used Java cache. The company sells enterprise support for Ehcache, as well as an Ehcache-based solution called BigMemory.

Software AG is the fourth largest company in Europe and is best known for as a business process management (BPM) software vendor. According to the company's announcement: "This acquisition will allow Software AG to provide innovative cloud solutions and dramatically increase the performance and scalability of its Business Process Excellence platform."

Yesterday we told you about some details about the ARM version of Windows 8 that an Intel manager shared on an investor call. Now The Register, which originally broke the news, reports that Microosoft is denying the accuracy of Intel's claims.

But Redmond isn't saying which parts of Intel's statements are true.

Today Google announced support for pivot tables to the Google Docs spreadsheet application. According to Wikipedia, pivot tables "can automatically sort, count, total or give the average of the data stored in one table or spreadsheet. It displays the results in a second table (called a "pivot table") showing the summarized data." It's a common approach to data visualization and business intelligence.

Unfortunately, pivot tables from Microsoft Excel can't be imported into Google Docs yet.

When Microsoft announced its acquisition of Skype, it marked another turning point for many early adopters who have known the simplicity and usefulness of the service since its first days of availability back in 2003.

What the acquisition also represents is the potential for greater adoption by business people. Of course that will depend on how Microsoft treats Skype. It will be integrated into the Microsoft suite for use as a sanctioned communications tool. But the signs are there that Microsoft will respect the service as a stand-alone product for the millions of people who love it for what it is.

EMC World is taking place in Las Vegas today. In addition to the announcement of EMC's own Apache Hadoop appliance and distribution, several other companies have announced new products ranging from software integration tools to storage appliances.

We've covered the increasing competition and innovation in the Hadoop market, and those trends show no signs of slowing down.

Red Hat today announced JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6, which it calls "a cloud-ready, highly scalable distributed data cache." Cameron Purdy defines a data grid as "a system composed of multiple servers that work together to manage information and related operations - such as computations - in a distributed environment."

Like Apache Cassandra and Riak, Red Hat's data grid is influenced by Amazon's distributed data store Dynamo. The product will cache data in-memory and distribute among multiple servers, which will be useful for cloud computing.

Xobni is launching a gadget platform and app store that allows you to run third-party apps in Outlook.

It is fairly robust. Xobni is launching with a number of services. Application partners include Dropbox, Yammer, Atlassian, Salesforce.com and a host of others.

The Symantec Vision Conference is where we are spending our time today, starting with the keynote address by Enrique Salem, president and chief executive officer.

Major themes we expect to hear about include mobile security, the cloud backup question and the next fit with virtualization.

Let's get started.