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IBM continued its acquisition feast today by gobbling up Clarity Systems, a financial governance software company. It also completed its acquisition of risk and compliance management software company OpenPages. Last week IBM acquired governance software company PSS Systems, and last month it acquired big data company Netezza.

IBM says "These strategic moves further accelerate IBM's business analytics efforts, one of the fastest growing segments in the overall IT industry and a key growth play for IBM." And the company's CFO Mark Loughridge projects business analytics will generate $16 billion in revenue for the company by 2015. But what is business analytics, and how does it differ from business intelligence?

A new Harris Interactive survey, Fortune 1000 Executives' Perspectives on Enterprise Innovation, sponsored by Olympus, found that while the vast majority of the 304 executives who responded believe that enterprise innovation is extremely important, 53% believe their organizations aren't doing enough to promote innovation. The survey identifies several barriers to enterprise innovation.

The recession gets blamed for the losses of thousands of jobs. But rarely do we hear about what it has done to make new markets possible.

The SaaS marketplace may be one of the economy's clearest examples of how recessions clear away old practices for new ones that are modern, more exciting and a lot less expensive.

As reported by Network World, the software market is going through a massive shift. According to IDC, the SaaS market is growing six times faster than all of software. Through 2014, the SaaS market is expected to grow 26 percent on an annual rate.

Well, almost any browser based app anyway. Socialcast announced today a new product called Socialcast Reach. Reach will bring Socialcast streams into SharePoint or any other application that supports HTML and JavaScript. Socialcast is trying to solve the problem of too many applications by bringing activity streams into the applications users already spend their time in.

Socialcast's approach is similar to but different from the approach taken by SimplyBox. SimplyBox has created a collaboration tool that can run as a web application, desktop application, Outlook plugin and browser plugin. The browser plugin allows users to access their SimplyBox streams from any web based application.

Microsoft announced today that Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is stepping down from his position. Although Microsoft does not intend to replace Ozzie, he will assist in transferring his responsibilities during a transition period before focusing on consumer entertainment projects at Microsoft. Ozzie has a long history in enterprise software, having worked for Lotus, IBM, Groove Networks and eventually Microsoft.

Ozzie joined Microsoft in 2005 when the company acquired Groove, which Ozzie co-founded, and turned it into SharePoint Workspaces. Ozzie replaced Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect in 2006. Ozzie shared his cloud-centric view of enterprise collaboration in his now famous Internet Services Disruption memo, pioneered Azure and ran Microsoft's social computing research lab. What does his departure mean for enterprise software?

A lot has changed for Rypple, a startup focused on helping employees get feedback, since we first covered it in June of last year. The service has rolled out several new features and closed another round of funding. We caught up with Rypple to find out what's changed, and talked with Rypple customer Rackspace to find out how service works in practice.

Consumer location based services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places are hot right now, but how is location being used in the enterprise? There are numerous applications for location-based technologies in the enterprise - such as asset tracking, routing and geo-fencing. Several companies are working in this space now to enable businesses to use location for more than just marketing. Here are a few that we've found.

Enterprise collaboration SaaS Huddle and Outlook plugin vendor Xobni announced this morning a partnership to bring Huddle into users inboxes via Xobni. Huddle's Xobni gadget will display a user's Huddle activity stream, shared workspaces and latest files. Xobni already pulls profile information from sources such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Salesforce.com, but Huddle integration bring a new dimension to the plugin as an professional collaboration tool.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux, has published a report entitled "Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users." The report is based on a survey of 387 large enterprise organization from both the public and private sector. And it contends that Linux is poised to gain significant market share in coming years, "becoming more mission critical in the enterprise."

The survey found that not only are more organizations deploying Linux relative to other operating systems, but that Linux is becoming the preferred platform for new deployments, something the report contends breaks with older user patterns as people move away from legacy systems and move into the cloud.

Mark Zuckerberg, interviewed on the subject of Facebook Groups, told GigOm's Liz Gannes "Yeah, well maybe this will replace Socialcast! [laughs] Not today, this isn't designed to be an enterprise product."

Socialcast's Carrie Young asks "if Facebook Groups will kill enterprise microblogging?" and answers with a firm "no." As Adam Greenfield says "This rarely kills That outright." But should enterprise collaboration vendors be worried?