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In the 20th century, corporations recruited talented professionals but then nurtured them and integrated them into their organizations. Talent was part of their business foundations. In the more intricate economy of the 21st, talent is something perceived to be possessed by individuals. Corporations recruit these people, and then undertake what's called compensation management in an effort to retain them as long as possible, and to let go of talent that doesn't perform up to scale.

The value of a single, global database for evaluating the dollar value of individual talent on a real-time scale was affirmed today in a very big way, with the announcement of Oracle's intention to acquire cloud-based talent management system Taleo.

Little bit of news around Node.js today, Amazon has added support for Identity Federation, and Oracle customers might want to pay attention to a fundamental flaw that's been discovered in Oracle database systems.

Node.js v0.6.8 – The Node.js team has released a new stable version, 0.6.8. This release updates V8 to 3.6.6.19, updates npm to 1.1.0-2, and fixes a number of bugs.

As prominent as cloud computing has already become in today's enterprises, it's amazing to realize that the world's reference standards are only now catching up with the concept. On Tuesday, the consortium of industry stakeholders known as The Open Group updated its reference standards for Service-Oriented Architecture. You remember SOA, don't you?

Well, if you've been following along with the SOA story, you know that cloud computing platforms have catapulted the service concept onto a huge and growing platform. Now, the consortium - led by software giants IBM, Oracle, and SAP, along with HP, and business consultancy CapGemini - has produced a formal interpretation of the role services play in the cloud, by offering a new term for the concept. Say it with me (if you can): XaaS.

Years ago, Oracle's responses to reports of SQL injection attacks against its database servers literally were focused on media damage control - ensuring that not too many customers get scared by them. (To be fair, Microsoft had the same policy.) The basic concept of SQL injection is all too simple: Feed intentionally malformed instructions into the system in such a way that the server responds with clues that could enable you to obtain unprivileged data - or sometimes, with the data itself.

How hard could it be, security engineers and college professors argued for over a decade, for a company like Oracle to deploy a ZoneAlarm-like firewall that could independently analyze incoming SQL instructions, parse them, and only permit those that meet specific criteria? For years, well-minded engineers were told in response that yet another firewall would render networks too slow and inoperative. Then in May 2010, Oracle learned it could just simply acquire Secerno, an emerging database firewall company.

Larry Ellison's dream for Oracle has always been to deliver "out-of-the-box" functionality - software that was less distinguishable from devices, devices that were vehicles for delivering software. So Ellison's vision of functionality has always been to some degree, shall we say, "cloudy." But it's hard to put a cloud in a box. And when you try, your competitors and even your (former) friends are liable to try to burn you for it.

They've already started getting out their matches. Today, Oracle formally announced the impending delivery of WebLogic Server 12c, which is software for deploying Java EE 6 applications via servers that can be virtualized. Next week, Oracle will begin delivering this critical next stage of its software delivery architecture. Whether it qualifies as "cloud" may depend on whether you spell it with an upper- or lower-case "c."

With the announcement by Oracle of their acquisition of RightNow earlier this week, it has brought about some strange bedfellows on how their mutual customers can connect up disparate CRM and other SaaS-based customer support systems. Indeed, at the center of the integration between Oracle and RightNow's technologies lies a product that is sold by IBM called WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration. Let's look a bit more closely at what is going on here.

Whether the acronym "NoSQL" stands for "not only SQL," as some database architects content, or literally "no SQL," up until this month, it has been taken to imply "no Oracle." One of the many hallmarks of Oracle's SQL RDBMS technology, historically, has been consistency -- the notion that every client perceives the same view of the data at any one time. Maintaining consistency, among other factors, incurs latency issues as database sizes scale with social media into the stratosphere.

NoSQL databases scale up, but typically at the expense of consistency, which is something you wouldn't think Oracle would want to give up.

If anyone knew the real reason behind the much-hyped kerfuffle a few weeks ago between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and his would-be OpenWorld conference guest, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, she kept it to herself rather skillfully. As it turns out, Oracle executives held an all-hands-on-deck meeting late last week; and this morning, the obvious Easter-egg-shaped clue everyone missed emerged as if it had just been laid: Oracle has entered into an agreement to purchase Salesforce's fiercest competitor in the CRM space, RightNow.

Up until the point where data starts making sense, by definition, it doesn't make much sense. Information requires analysis. And despite its name and its mission, the Web presents more unstructured, unrelated data than any information source ever created.

So it shouldn't surprise anyone that the biggest trend in data management today surrounds analysis of data outside of databases. We heard this two weeks ago from Oracle at its OpenWorld conference, and we're hearing it again today with Oracle's acquisition of an analysis tool provider named Endeca.

Is HTML5 a common platform for rich Internet applications, or a common toolkit for building rich applications on varying platforms? Oracle's response to that question came yesterday, and in typical Larry Ellison fashion, it essentially boiled down to, "We don't give a rip."

When Sun Microsystems produced the first go-round of JavaFX in December 2008, its aim was to build and promote an entirely new declarative language - not Java, not JavaScript - for describing the front-end UI of a distributed app. What developers needed at that time was a simpler, programmatic way to approach the contents of UIs. CSS looked under-developed, and although Microsoft's approach (XAML) was certainly thorough, it lacked the more conservative, procedural approach that veteran programmers were accustomed to.