What’s New: In brief (August 02, 2005)

An Ontario police safety campaign “the good, the bad, and the rusty” resulted in Ontario police officers writing approximately 1,000 speeding tickets, more than 50 seatbelt-violation citations and revoking keys from 21 impaired drivers. Police also removed license plates from more than 150 vehicles that failed safety inspections by the end of the August 1 long weekend. The blitz referred to drivers that stay within the law, those who dangerously bend the rules and those driving unsafe vehicles. In addition to personal vehicles, the police inspected 15 U-Haul rental vehicles, and11 of were not up to standard. The government of Ontario plans to launch a province-wide investigation into the truck-rental industry as a result of recent media investigations which discovered half of U-Haul vehicles failed roadside safety inspections. Surprise inspections of the major truck rental company vehicles are also expected to soon be implemented by Ministry of Transportation investigators.

IBM has signed an agreement to acquire DWL, a privately held company based in Atlanta and Toronto. Financial terms were not disclosed. DWL is a provider of integration middleware, which helps companies provide a single integrated view of prospect and customer information spread across multiple product and business silos. This capability allows insurance companies to quickly and consistently leverage their customer data to help address business challenges such as regulatory compliance, optimizing customer relationships or integrating data from mergers and acquisitions. This capability can give them valuable customer insight in transactions and day-to-day interactions. The acquisition follow IBM’s recent acquisition of Pureedge. DWL is now the fifth Canadian software Company that IBM has purchased since 2002. Built on a Java-based platform, DWL’s development is consistent with IBM’s overall software strategy.