ASK JEEVES, IN an effort to boost its profile in self-service applications, on Monday announced its acquisition of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Octopus, which offers enterprise integration and information presentation software. Octopus technology will be applied to the JeevesOne software product, a natural-language interface offered by Jeeves Solutions, a division of Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves. Incorporation of the Octopus technology will enable the Jeeves software to answer questions via access to information in ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems. Currently, only Web content is available as an information source. Version 1.2 of JeevesOne, due by March, will integrate Jeeves and Octopus technology. JeevesOne historically had been provided as an outsourced service, but will be relaunched as a software product. Key to Octopus’s software is the use of meta data, which is information about the origin of data sets. Ask Jeeves would not reveal how much it is paying for Octopus. Software Development