On the heels of the EU’s approval of Oracle’s $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, the tech giant has opened up the purse strings to acquire application management software provider AmberPoint. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close in the first half of this year.

We wrote about Bantam Live, an online workspace for business teams that has “social CRM” features, when the startup presented its product at TechCrunch’s RealTime Stream CrunchUp last July. Today, Bantam is launching the commercial version of its social workspace and is rolling out premium features to its product.

Bantam Live’s software-as-a-service product provides an online workspace for business teams that includes a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native social CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships inside and outside the organization via the real-time activity stream.

IBM has acquired Chicago-based software firm Initiate Systems. Initiate helps healthcare providers and other government organizations manage and organize data across various sources. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

It appears that the acquisition is aimed at boosting IBM’s healthcare offerings. According to IBM, Initiate’s software us currently in use at more than 2,400 healthcare sites, over 40 health information exchanges and multiple government health systems around the world including CVS/Caremark, Blue Cross Blue Shield, United Healthcare Services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

2009 was a banner year for Salesforce.com. The enterprise cloud computing company made significant enhancements to its product lineup, reported overall strong earnings, and even launched their own take on realtime enterprise social networking and collaboration, Chatter. Today, Salesforce is launching one of its first product enhancements for 2010: the Force.com Visual Process Manager.

Force.com, company’s platform to build and deploy enterprise applications, will now allows companies to design and deploy business processes inside their apps without having to build the applications on other software. Customers can visually design any complex business process with a design tool and instantly run it in the cloud without writing a single line of code. The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.

One casualty of Oracle’s $7.4 billion deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, which was recently approved by the European Commission, is the closure of Project Kenai. Sun’s Project Kenai is a collaborative hosting site for free and open source projects.

Project Kenai allows developers to collaborate with each other and allows for free software project hosting. Its services services included version controlled source code repositories, team wikis, a download area to host documents, an integrated team member IM chat, issue tracking, forums, mailing lists, and web hooks for selected events. Project Kenai’s domain will be closed and the infrastructure will be continue to be used under NetBeans.org. Owners who had projects hosted under Kenai will have to migrate their content to other locations and repositories.

Stealth startup Makara is launching publicly tonight with its cloud-based application deployment and management platform. Formerly known as WebappVM, Makara has raised angel funding from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The startup also raised $6 million last year from Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures.

Rather than offer a system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara’s’s cloud-based platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product, which is self-service and self-managing, is available for free on its site.

Cloudkick, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that offers a free server management system to businesses, is rolling out its freemium model and additional features. Cloudkick provides detailed graphs on the health of your servers, and tools to categorize and keep information about what each server is doing. Cloudkick’s dashboard allows you to easily add or remove servers from Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting, and VPS.NET and then monitor an unlimited amount of instances. You can see all the servers in one place, and color-code and label each server.

Cloudkick will check whether servers are alive and functioning and then alert you, via email, if servers go down. Cloudkick also provides data on bandwith and other metrics on servers in easy to use graphs and tables, allowing you a visual snapshot of server activity. You can also access servers straight from web and can run commands through your web browser remotely, which is handy when you are trying to manage servers from another computer

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.

According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed.

At IBM’s annual conference, Lotusphere, Big Blue has announced innovations to its cloud-based collaboration platform, LotusLive. LotusLive provides enterprise users with online email, web conferencing, social network and collaboration applications within the cloud.

To spur innovation around the platform, IBM is officially launching LotusLive Labs, an R&D pipeline that combines the resources of IBM Research with Lotus. The venture is kicking off with a suite of new LotusLive technologies at the conference including Slide Library, a collaborative way to build and share presentations; Collaborative Recorded Meetings, a service that records and instantly transcribes meeting presentations and audio/video for searching and tagging; Event Maps, an way to visualize and interact with conference schedules; and Composer, the ability to create LotusLive mashups through the combination of the platform’s services. Project Concord will also debut as a web-based document editor for creating and sharing documents, presentations and spreadsheets. And IBM will be adding LotusLive support for the iPhone via Labs.

Yesterday, Microsoft and HP announced a joint call to discuss a significant partnership. According to a announcement issued today, the two tech giants are jointly investing $250 million in a cloud computing venture.

The solution will advance existing cloud computing by speeding application implementation and will be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model. The new offering will also promise to be less complex and will lower overall costs for enterprises. It seems to basically hook Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, which went live earlier this month, into HP’s hardware. The resulting offering promises to deliver improved application performance, efficiency and interoperability. The venture is also designed to allow users to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires, which is a boon to many businesses.

Spiceworks, a startup that develops a social IT management software, has raised $16 million in Series C funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners with Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $29 million.

Spiceworks develops a desktop software suite that helps a company’s IT staff collaborate with each other and manage “everything IT.” The IT management software, which is free and ad-supported, is currently being used by 850,000 IT professionals at small to medium businesses in 196 countries to inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for their IT networks. Currently more than 25 percent of all businesses with greater than 100 employees rely on Spiceworks to manage their IT operations.

Does Cisco have a shopping addiction? The tech giant has acquired a handful of technology companies in only a matter of a few months! This week, Cisco opened up its purse strings once again to acquire data center security startup Rohati Systems for an undisclosed amount.

Cisco recently acquired the set-top box business of one of China’s largest cable companies, DVN, for $44.5 million. This deal was peanuts compared to Cisco’s other 2009 acquisitions including the acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. And last fall, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which followed the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg in late September.

Software giant EMC starting the New Year with another acquisition. EMC is acquiring Archer Technologies, a company that develops governance, risk and compliance software. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2010.

Archer Techonologies’ software will be folded into EMC’s Security Division. The company has six million licensed users of its software and boats and impressive client list that includes 25 of the Fortune 100. The software tracks the lifecycle of corporate policies and objectives, analyzes and manages business risks, and compliance. EMC says that Archer’s technology will help its customers manage risk in their IT infrastructure.

Trackle, a personalized web and RSS feed tracker we wrote about earlier this year, is making itself a whole lot more social today with the launch of a real-time search engine on the site that lets you follow other people’s Trackles. Trackle.com’s free web service provides personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user’s house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and more.

The new search platform within Trackle lets you search for other user’s trackings by keyword. Here’s how it works: people within the Trackle community contribute by setting up alerts for very specific and changing information (they will show up in search when users set up their profiles as public). These alerts are then shared by the community, specific, time-sensitive information, such as information is then posted on Trackle as it happens, in real time. Duplicate requests are removed, so there are no repeated alerts.

Autodesk, the developer of software design applications, has acquired PlanPlatform, a competing company. According to reports, Autodesk shelled out between $20-$30 million for the Israeli startup. Autodesk, a publicly traded company, provides software design applications for a variety of industries, including Architecture, Engineering, Media and Entertainment.

PlanPlatform, formerly known as Visual Tao, develops SaaS that provides engineers with two-dimensional and three-dimensional software drafting tools. The startup recently $4.3 million, with Sequoia Capital leading the round. Autodesk has acquired a number of companies, including Algor, SoftImage and 3D Geo.

Moments after we heard reports of Facebook’s new URL shortener, Google launched its own service, aptly called goo.gl.

At the moment, its only being used for Google Toolbar and Feedburner. Google just announced the new service as a sharing feature of Toolbar that will let you share a web page directly from Toolbar. The shortener is not a stand alone service and is not available for “broader consumer use.” That is, at least for now. Google assures that its shortener will be stable and secure to help protect users from clicking on malicious sites. And unsurprisingly, Google promises a speedy service for links.

Startup CloudShare, formerly known as IT Structures, has raised $10 million in series B financing from Sequoia Capital, Gemini Capital, and Charles River Ventures. This brings CloudShare’s total funding up to $16 million.

That amount of funding isn’t shabby for a company that has been in stealth for nearly two years. Cloudshare, which launched to the public, last week, has produced a service for demoing software in the cloud. Organizations can instantly deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing demos or training environments from CloudShare’s platform.

Google recently added a sharing feature to Google Groups with the search giant’s productivity suite, Google Apps to make the two products work more efficiently together. Tonight, Google is going full monty with Groups and launching an enterprise-friendly version of Groups that will integrated with Premier and Education Editions of Google Apps.

Google says that Groups is one of its most widely used applications. Groups is a collaborative application that essentially lets anyone create discussion forums, mailing lists, pages, and more for small and large scale groups. With the Apps version of Groups, employees can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can also use groups as mailing lists to share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with entire groups. Users can receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.

At Microsoft’s PDC event a few weeks ago, Microsoft Live Labs introduced a new technology, called Pivot, to make sense of interconnectedness between objects on the web. The underlying base for Pivot is to view relationships between “collections” of individual information on the the web. Many of the connections between items on the web aren’t necessarily tangible, but Pivot helps crawl massive amount of objects on the web and produces sleek visualizations of all that is connected. We sat down with Microsoft developer Gary Flake, who created Pivot, and Microsoft evangelist Brandon Watson to take an in-depth look at the application. While Pivot is currently in private beta, we have 500 invites for TechCrunch readers who use the code “16FC 2946 0C4C 4CCB” when downloading the app here.

Pivot is itself a standalone application, but it relies heavily on Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. The best way to understand the importance of Pivot is through a real-world example of how this technology would work. So let’s say I wanted a visualization of all the Wikipedia links to TechCrunch, Pivot would essentially crawl all of Wikipedia and create a map of the Wikipedia pages that are connected to TechCrunch, such as Michael Arrington’s Wikipedia page.

Startup InfoDome has recently launched to help small and medium-sized businesses develop online databases easily and painlessly. True Ventures backed-InfoDome lets users create online databases by scratch or by using the startup’s customized templates.

Users can import data from Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, FilemakerPro, Word and other applications. The browser-based platform lets administrators share forms and reports with specific users and features easy to use drag and drop tools to create forms and reports.

Aravo, a SAAS supplier chain management tool just raised a whopping $27 million in Series D funding led by Cisco, with other investors participating. In addition, Cisco’s web meeting and collaboration platform, WebEx, will be integrated with Aravo’s Supplier Information Management (SIM) to facilitate real-time collaboration between buyers and suppliers.

This latest investment brings Aravo’s total funding to $50 million. Investors that participated in the latest round include Big Sky Partners, Stephen Friedman and William Harrison. Aravo says the new funding will be used to develop new products and to expand sales, marketing, and delivery channels. As part of the agreement, Aravo will work closely with Cisco to power and enhance Cisco WebEx. Aravo’s software includes options to track ISO certifications, sustainability initiatives, and risk analysis.

Rumors have been swirling that IBM will be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, The Market, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue is reportedly shelling out $225 million for Israel-based Guardium. This year alone, IBM has acquired six companies, including RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.

A subsidiary of Log-On Software, Guardium provides technologies that ensure security of enterprise databases. The startup protects databases for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and other companies. The Market reports that Guardium is profitable, with sales in the tens of millions per year.

As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.

LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network.