Oracle makes plans to everywhere in the enterprise, while Cisco gains control over a key Web protocol.

Oracle Sets Ambitious Goals for 2009
The economy may be shaky but you wouldn't know it looking at Oracle's financials. The company outlined its plans at Oracle OpenWorld to continue its winning ways in part via new partnerships with Dell and EMC and , an expanded relationship with Hewlett-Packard, and alliances with Intel on cloud computing. The top two strategic initiatives for Oracle appear to be cloud computing and an expanded push into collaboration software with a new Beehive offering. In general, we're starting to see a lot more talk about databases and cloud computing, so expect Oracle to be driving hard to establish a bigger presences in the cloud. But in the meantime, details on version 2.0 of the Oracle 11g database are scarce.

IBM Brings Lotus Notes to the Cloud
With both Microsoft and Oracle moving to delivering collaboration software as a service, IBM finally starts moving in the same direction.

Cisco Buys Jabber to Gain Control of Key Web 2.0 Protocol
With its acquisition of Jabber, Cisco is positioning itself to be the lynchpin underneath a whole slew of next generation collaboration applications.

Google Sees Sensors Driving Next Evolution of Mobile Computing
Following the official launch of the first Google Android phone, Google is starting to lay out a vision of mobile computing that relies on sensors to develop the next generation of mobile applications. You can get a look at the new phone here, but the reactions to the new mobile phone are decidedly neutral to negative. But whatever happens, it looks like Android has the potential to hurt Microsoft's ambitions in this space.

Gogimon Looks to Unite Multiple Search Services Under a Common Interface
Rather than rely on only one search engine, Gogimon makes it easier to employ multiple search engines against the same query. That could probably only help Microsoft as it continues to lose ground to Google in search and gets criticized for doing too little with the Powerset search technology it recently acquired.

Developers Express Frustration with Bigger Browser War
Now that Google's Chrome offering has been downloaded two million times or more, developers are figuring out that having to support multiple browser is not in their best interests. Meanwhile, the folks at Mozilla have committed to work with Stopbadware to help reduce security threats and also pledged to remove the end user license agreement on all instances of the Mozilla browser because the concept is incompatible with open source software.

Microsoft Sheds Light on Visual Studio 10
With the rise of multi-core processors and growing interest in parallelism, Microsoft is looking to make sure it does not lose its dominance over the hearts and minds of developers as it watches high-performance computing models start find mainstream adoption. In the meantime, both Intel and AMD are talking about next generation processors to support these types of applications.

IT Organizations Are Not Keeping Pace with Advancements in Encryption
That's the conclusion of a recent study that has come out as Nevada gets ready to require encryption on electronic mail. Of course, the rise of encryption may be one reason that more IT organizations are looking to managed security services. But even with the rise of encryption, it's still pretty surprising how easily vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin's e-mail password was hacked.