As Oracle announced a fourth-quarter revenue decline of only 5 percent, Wall Street cheered that tech could be ready for a comeback. One sector that is especially optimistic is open source: Red Hat reported an 11 percent revenue increase over the prior year.

Even Intel and Nokia are embracing open source. The two companies announced they will collaborate on a new device to compete in the smartphone market and that it will be centered on two open source projects.

There's no doubt that Larry Ellison is rethinking his next steps. He seems to be retracting his earlier dismissal of cloud computing - especially in light of the Sun acquisition (even as he had no trouble "killing" the Virtual Iron business.)

EMC, Google and IBM are all pursuing cloud computing, but with different strategies. IBM debuted two new enterprise cloud computing offerings, while HP and Skytap are testing cloud applications.

SOA vendors are moving their models to the cloud - whether they like it or now. Many see it as a way to stay relevant but need to lower their margins in the process.

The number of cloud platforms is increasing. But is there really one cloud? InfoWorld counts down the myths associated with cloud computing.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Hello , an "enterprise Facebook", demonstrated the opportunity for social networking at work. (On the other hand, Wikipedia's efforts to police entries on Michael Jackson's death are an example of Web 2.0 challenges.)

Gartner says the worst is over for the PC industry. Sales of netbooks and lower-priced notebooks will help the market begin to recover in 2010.

The rapidly evolving PC market coupled with cost-cutting efforts at enterprises is pressuring Microsoft to change its ways. Subscription models and faster deployment of new versions of its products are just two of the ways Redmond is fighting back.

As the outsourcing market shows signs of recovery, scandalized Satyam rebranded itself - sort of. The company's acquisition by Tech Mahindra resulted in a new name for the company, Mahindra Satyam.

Noted & Quoted

• Former Motorola CEO Ed Zander was appointed to NetSuite's Board of Directors.
• Global mergers halve during second quarter.
• The cloud computing security market will continue to expand.
• Symantec's CEO's focus is SaaS, not shopping.

"Oracle is a pretty boring story without Sun."
- Yun Kim, analyst at Broadpoint AmTech on Oracle's fourth quarter results