Information Age (London, UK) articles from April 2003

Information Age (London, UK) archives from April 2003

Leading Geeks.
April 28, 2003... Everyone knows the stereotype: pizza-eating, coke-swilling, socially inept, hygiene-challenged, sci-fi loving geeks; they cannot and will not fit in with corporate culture, will laugh at a manager that tries to pull rank, use their technology...

Microsoft's money-making scheme.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... When Microsoft announced its new software-licensing programme, Software Assurance, in May 2001, there was uproar from users and analysts. Not only did it do away with off-the-shelf upgrades, meaning that businesses could no longer purchase the...

Agile Business 2003.
April 28, 2003... In June 2003, Information Age is organising its second major conference on the theme of business agility - The Agile Business. Last year's conference attracted over 400 senior level attendees over the course of two days. This year looks set...

Fiorina the bad.
April 28, 2003... Hewlett-Packard's takeover of Compaq Computer was a world record. Not only did the $20 billion price tag make it the technology sector's biggest ever deal, the proxy battle to get the merger approved ended up costing a colossal $111 million....

Fiorina the good.
April 28, 2003... Hewlett-Packard's takeover of Compaq Computer was a world record. Not only did the $20 billion price tag make it the technology sector's biggest ever deal, the proxy battle to get the merger approved ended up costing a colossal $111 million....

Less really is more.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... Spending more on technology helps make your business more efficient, more competitive and more competitive, right? Wrong. According to a recent survey by Alinean, a return-on-investment (ROI) consulting company, the more successful a...

Eating out of your lap.
April 28, 2003... The old adage 'most deals are done of the golf course' may be true for lawyers, but it certainly isn't the case for IT professionals. According to a new survey carried out by PizzaExpress, the restaurant chain, IT staff are more likely to...

Corporate performance management.
April 28, 2003... According to David Norton, the co-inventor of the balanced scorecard approach to business performance monitoring, seven out of 10 organisations fail to execute on their strategy. The simple reason? They still lack adequate management tools. ...

That process thing, again.
April 28, 2003... If there is one word that has come to dominate the discussion of IT in business over the past two years, it is 'process'. Business process management, process-level integration, business process outsourcing, even, most recently,...

Great expectations.
April 28, 2003... Microsoft has a problem - a major problem. Around half of the customers of its most important piece of enterprise software - the Windows Server operating system - are stuck on an eight-year-old version of the product. They haven't moved from...

News review.
April 28, 2003... Services giant EDS bid farewell to its CEO of four years, Dick Brown. The departure was amicable, particularly for Brown who was given a 'good bye' package worth some $35 million. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were reported to be sniffing...

Road to nowhere.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... Workers and executives in Silicon Valley have been noting for the past two years how much less traffic there is on the roads around major technology centres. But now official figures have quantified the scale of the job losses in the region....

IT spending on the rise, but not by much.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... IDC has pegged back its forecast for IT spending, citing the continued economic malaise and prolonged uncertainty about Iraq. At the end of 2002, the analyst group forecast that IT spending would grow by between 8% and 9% over the next four...

The IT retiree club.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... As predicted in last month's issue of Information Age, Hasso Plattner, long-time CEO of SAP, is stepping back from the day-to-day running of the company he co-founded. Plattner, 59, will still keep an eye on SAP, taking on the role of...

You piece of crap, take that.
April 28, 2003... Virtually every computer user has shouted obscenities at their system at one time or another, and in a recent survey one in 10 users admitted to physically abusing their PCs. But, be warned, taking your anger out on your computer could put...

Supply chain implementation ravages ICI.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... Chemical industry giant ICI has demonstrated in spectacular fashion the consequences of a botched software implementation. A recent profits warning from the company, which resulted in a 39% drop in its share price, blamed major problems...

The slow road back.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... The IT industry inched closer to the end of recession in March, with tentative signs that it could be back in positive growth by May. The Infoconomy Global Index, a monitor of the quarter-on-quarter revenue growth of the world's 200 largest...

Services companies search for winning formula.
April 28, 2003... Patterns of business in the IT services market have changed beyond all recognition in the past two years. Gone are the days of unending customisation, integration and implementation contracts. Instead, IT services companies need three main...

When the sun never sets.
April 28, 2003... Global companies are hardly new, and nor are international networks of computers. Dip into the corporate histories of IBM, BP or General Motors, and they tell stories of electronic file transfers dating back to the early 1960s. But naivety...

Down and out.
April 28, 2003... Now that it has run out of cash and seems set to be broken up at the behest of its creditors, at least the arguments about Divine can finally stop. Was the brainchild of Silicon Valley mogul Andrew 'Flip' Filipowski a software company, a web...

CRM paradox.
April 28, 2003... Almost half of all the customer relationship management (CRM) software licences sold to organisations in recent years have never been deployed. And, in light of poor return-on-investment (ROI) figures, they probably never will be. That is...

Working on the move.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... The number of employees in Western Europe that spend at least part of their working day on the move is set to increase to more than 80 million, close on half of the total workforce, by 2007, says a new survey carried out by IDC on behalf of...

Portal pioneers fall as Cisco goes SOHO.
April 28, 2003... "Does anybody in their right mind believe portals should be developed by a separate group of companies?" asked PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway back in January 2002. "There's not enough science in them for anybody to turn to a third-party software...

IT buyers look forward to bigger budgets.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... Enterprises expect to increase their technology budgets by an average of 2.7% over the next six to 12 months, according to market analyst Aberdeen Group's latest quarterly survey of CIOs and other IT decision-makers. That growth rate is down 1%...

Mega deals on the rise.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... Pressure on IT budgets and the drive for an increased return on technology investments led to a boom in 'mega' outsourcing deals in 2002, says TPI, a leading US outsourcing advisor. The company says that the number of mega deals across the...

PC prices continue to fall.(Brief Article)
April 28, 2003... The average price of a PC in Europe is continuing to fall, according to the latest PC Pricing Index from market research company, IDC. The index, which tracks relative pricing movements, lost nearly two points in January 2003, registering...

Together forever.
April 28, 2003... In June 1996, IT services giant EDS issued a triumphant press release announcing a 10-year, u100 million contract to re-engineer and manage UK holiday operator Airtours' IT systems. The deal, EDS noted, was revolutionary. Under a so-called...

Endgame looms at Getronics.
April 28, 2003... Amsterdam-based services supplier Getronics was always an unlikely rival to Accenture, Cap Gemini and EDS, but in May 1999 when it scooped up Wang Global for $1.8 billion, anything seemed possible. Getronics had grown fast during the 1990s...

ISS manages growth in hard times.
April 28, 2003... It is surprising, says Internet Security Systems (ISS) CEO Tom Noonan, how things can turn full circle. "Originally we were a managed services provider because Internet Scanner [ISS's first product] was not stable enough to package and ship to...

BEA convergence plan underlines bid for platform status.
April 28, 2003... When Alfred Chuang, the chief executive of the Java platform software company BEA, bounced onto the stage amid the dry ice at the company's eWorld conference in Orlando this March, he appeared to be in a triumphant, celebratory mood. ...

E.piphany builds on web services architecture.
April 28, 2003... Almost half of all the customer relationship management (CRM) software licences sold to organisations in recent years have never been deployed, according to a March 2003 survey of CIOs and technology decision-makers by Gartner. War stories of...

lastminute.com.
April 28, 2003... Information Age (IA): lastminute.com has morphed from an Internet start-up into a publicly listed, profitable company. What role has technology played in this? Chip Steinmetz (CS): This is a very technology-oriented business. From the...

Readers' letters.(Letter to the Editor)
April 28, 2003... ERP unusable? Depends on who is using it I read with interest your article in the February edition highlighting the recent Forrester ERP research (Insider, Information Age, February 2003). 'ERP is unusable' is a very bold statement and...

The power of process.
April 28, 2003... A group of big-name IT chiefs, including Maggie Miller of Sainsbury's, Vodafone's Malcolm Mitchell and Kevin Lloyd of Barclays, recently got together at a European Technology Forum discussion evening to debate how IT can maximise its...

Expert advice.
April 28, 2003... Dr Ashley Braganza, lecturer from Cranfield School of Management, attempts to answer the question: Companies ought to be divided into two categories: those who define processes and then purchase software, and those who purchase software...

Model makeover.
April 28, 2003... Computer Associates (CA) has always been a very different kind of software company, one that does not take its lead from others. And that singular nature has brought it its share of fortune - as well as plenty of trouble. While its peers...

Inland Revenue gets its DNA in a twist.
April 28, 2003... Asked what he thinks are the strengths of the various companies bidding for the biggest outsourcing contract ever to be granted in Europe, and Bill Thomas, the vice president of Europe for EDS, becomes generous, perhaps even a little...

Secure growth.
April 28, 2003... Just two years ago, analysts were confidently predicting that the security market would be immune to the malaise affecting the rest of the computer industry. The security threats that organisations faced, they said, remained the same regardless...

Storage armistice.
April 28, 2003... When storage giants EMC and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) ceased legal hostilities at the beginning of March 2003, two years after EMC first claimed HDS had stolen key technology designs, the ending was as sudden and unexpected as the beginning....

Altiris promises to halve PC management costs.
April 28, 2003... Desktop management software supplier Altiris achieved a rare feat in 2002. It was one of only a handful of technology companies to complete a successful initial public offering. That achievement was due in part to its impressive sales...

Deflationary pressures.
April 28, 2003... Heading to a storage trade exhibition in Birmingham in early 2002, Paul Rogers, was a man on a mission. Armed with a u300,000 budget, Rogers, the head of IT production at Tokyo-Mitsubishi International (TMI) in London, was under pressure to...

The guiding hand.
April 28, 2003... Charles E 'Chuck' Phillips is the nexus between Wall Street and the CIO. The head of enterprise software research at New York investment bank Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Phillips seeds the thousands of words of analysis he generates each day...

Searchspace offers fraud detection - and CRM.
April 28, 2003... Fraud has always been big business, but with the rise of electronic commerce, it has ballooned to enormous proportions. As a result, companies are finally starting to invest heavily in fraud detection software. Searchspace of the UK is...