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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.

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.

In a New York Times interview published yesterday, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff - who was no doubt relishing his place in the spotlight - poked a little fun at his competitors, whom he now perceives as challengers to his position. "Where are SAP, Microsoft, Oracle?" Benioff asked. "Why haven't they taken our customers?"

Well, Mr. Benioff might want to look over his shoulder. SAP, which still touts itself as the world's largest provider of business software, is entering one of Salesforce's prize markets in a very big way this morning: with a live social media analytics tool that leverages an existing mother lode of data on consumer sentiment from market research firm NetBase. The objective is to enable manufacturers and service providers to get live analysis of consumer sentiment about the services and products they offer, based on what they're tweeting to Twitter and Facebook.

Despite having been generally available for mobile systems like iOS for over two-and-a-half years now, you don't hear much about something called the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP). That may change soon, as a new set of mobile apps for human resources professionals, developed in conjunction with Sybase's parent company SAP, are demonstrating an emerging pathway for other developers to develop custom enterprise apps in the same vain.

Google just launched dynamic views for Blogger, its free blogging platform, and they are something else. Powered by AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, these new themes for Blogger users are heavy-duty, interactive designs, not mere blog templates. The announcement claims that they also load "40 percent faster than traditional templates," but that will require some testing. Just in trying to load Google's blog posts announcing this update, this author saw lots of new Blogger loading graphics with spinning gears.

Nevertheless, these designs look amazing. They have infinite scrolling, dynamic loading of graphics and new posts, easy re-sorting, keyboard shortcuts for navigation and, of course, one-click sharing to Google Plus "and other social sites." There are seven new templates, and they can be gently customized. More customization options will be added "in the coming weeks." The flagship Google blogs for Gmail, LatLong and Docs are getting dynamic makeovers, too.

Sheldon Laube has been around tech for decades, holding executive positions at leading consulting firms and working most notably at Price Waterhouse Coopers these last few years as chief innovation officer. I caught up with him this week and recorded a short podcast interview that you listen to here.

I spoke with him about his thoughts about collaboration and social media and how things have changed over the decades with these tools.

It will amount to being publicly shamed, and although Oracle gave SAP an escape hatch, it purposely made that hatch too small to crawl though. In a deal announced yesterday, SAP is likely to plead guilty on behalf of its former customer support unit, TomorrowNow (TN), on charges that it stole Oracle's intellectual property in an effort to support Oracle customers who were also TN clients.

The fresh set of charges was, according to multiple press sources, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco yesterday. (A copy of the filing was not yet available at press time.) The sole defendant in this new set of charges is TomorrowNow, shifting the shame over to the SAP subsidiary, although it will still be SAP that is liable for damages.

The changes in U.S. copyright law over the past three years affect the way damages are assessed. When a party is found guilty of infringement of copyright (which runs deeper than mere violation), the test now is the extent to which the infringed party is less able to license its intellectual property than it had planned back before it was infringed.

In other words, if you weren't going to sell something in the first place, you can't claim lost sales. That's what SAP argued after a jury awarded Oracle a record $1.3 billion, after finding SAP guilty of copyright infringement for tapping into Oracle's servers for product support data. Today, a federal court judge struck down that verdict, stating it didn't match the circumstances.

SAP announced today that several of its enterprise products will soon gain new features for visualizing location data from Google Maps. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and Streamwork were specifically mentioned. SAP expects these features to be available in both on-premise and hosted versions of its applications.

Big, or at least unbounded data, continues to have a profound impact on business intelligence, business analytics and data warehousing.

This week we saw a few particular developments in this area, as Endeca and SAP announced the next versions of some key products, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave some insight into Microsoft's big data strategy.