2004: The big events of the past year

Oracle wins PeopleSoft
In December, the battle for PeopleSoft ended and Oracle won. Now the question becomes: How will Oracle's pending $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft affect both companies' customers?

Microsoft and Sun bury the hatchet
In April, Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft Corp., and Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO at Sun Microsystems Inc., agreed to bury the hatchet after many years of hostility.

Eclipse declares independence
In February, a declaration of independence was issued for the Eclipse Platform with the announcement that the IBM-sponsored consortium for the open-source tools framework initiative is now a not-for-profit corporation.


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Sun, rivals celebrate J2EE 1.4
In May, Sun Microsystems marked the advent of Version 1.4 of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) at an event that featured most of the big names in Java tools and application servers, who gathered to discuss the impact of J2EE 1.4 on their products and markets. The app server panel included representatives from BEA, IBM, Oracle and Sun; open-source vendor JBoss Group; and two pure-play vendors: India's Pramati Technologies and Denmark's Trifork.



Eclipse 3.0 released
On June 21, the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of the latest version of the Eclipse Platform -- Eclipse 3.0 -- which added an enhanced version of its Java IDE, a new rich-client platform, and the integration of Java Swing with the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit.



CA names new CEO, restates revenue
In late April, the fallout over several years of accounting misdeeds at Computer Associates (CA) International Inc. culminated as the Islandia, N.Y.-based software maker restated more than $2 billion booked in 2000 and 2001 revenue and shuffled its management team.