Global vendor strategies - 22/1/06

Microsoft will invest $500m in China over the five next years.

Oracle continues its harvest: it bought 360Commerce, a point-of-sale management expert. The purchase will complement the acquisition of Retek, made last year. Oracle is positioning on the POS technologies market, where according to AMR Research, 26% of POS data processing budget is going to, and about 30% of retailers plan to upgrade their solutions.

Alcatel acquires GMK, a leading Brazilian company that specializes in contact center voice self-service and interactive voice response (IVR) solutions.

Broadcom unveiled its new Intensi-fi family of wireless LAN (WLAN) chipsets that are designed to comply with the IEEE 802.11n