In a move not seen very often, NASDAQ OMX Group, the company that owns and operates the Nasdaq stock index announced today the company would re-organize the weightings of certain securities in a bid to lower volatility.

Technology stocks that are traditionally more volatile will be adjusted to new lower weightings, and other stocks that are less volatile will now represent larger weightings.

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The Waterloo-based maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphone, Research In Motion (RIM) Ltd, is working on adding functionality in its yet-to-be-released BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer that would give the new tablet the capability to run third party applications designed for Google Android devices.

RIM has seen market share trend downwards as consumers (and traditional corporate customers) have shifted to other mobile platforms that offer a superior user experience (like more applications and better Internet browsing) all with comparable communication features.

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The technology giant, Oracle Inc., today released earnings for the fourth quarter of 2010.

The company posted strong revenues and net earnings.

Revenue for Q4 ’10, ended May 31st, was up almost 40-percent from Q4 ’09 to $6.6-billion.

Oracle reported $2.4-billion ($0.46 per share) in net profits in the period, up significantly from $1.9-billion ($0.38 per share) in the same period last year.

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Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff

The CRM software provider Salesforce.com has just posted strong second quarter financial results.

The company had a 20-percent increase in Q2 2009 (ended July 31) total revenue of $316.1 million compared to the same period last year.

Net income was up a significantly by 112-percent to $21.2 million, despite the fact that companies are spending less to curb costs during this tuff economic time.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that competition is intensifying between major rivals including Microsoft and Oracle, but the company is still fairing well and continues to win contracts over its major competitors.

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IBM has just completed its $340 million acquisition of ILOG Inc. ILOG is a Pairs based business rules engine maker. The systems provide business intelligence and allow executives to make better decisions based on events analysis. IBM was interested in taking over ILOG as IBM felt the merger would allow businesses to process and monitor more complex events with the ILOG systems. More companies are beginning to enter the events planning space, including Oracle and Streambase.

IBM was not previously as successful in this field because none of the products “amounted to a real strategy. We didn’t have tight engineering, focused on business event management,” said Kramer Reeves, IBM manager of business process management marketing. IBM failed to disclose any product plans a result of the acquisition.