Commerce platform provider hybris is partnering with LivePerson Inc. to offer a service that will enable electronic-commerce sites to offer a live chat feature to their customers.

Eight p.m. in the "war room" of Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems: 150 people from all over the world are on a conference call. The topic is a supply outage of trocars, a medical device used in microscopic surgery. Someone on the line, clearly untroubled by the crisis, speaks up. "It's just a trocar," he says.

Recognizing that an organization its size could no longer handle certain processes manually, the nation's third-largest school system finds a provider to unite its operations with its Oracle E-Business Suite.