Information Age (London, UK) articles from August 2005

Information Age (London, UK) archives from August 2005

Commoditisation and innovation.
August 10, 2005... Five years ago, a conference addressing the future of the data centre would have raised some interesting issues. In those days, at the height of the dot-com frenzy, many companies were ordering new servers by the gross but, although these...

BT: the next generation.
August 10, 2005... What keeps BT's Peter Bower awake at night? With responsibility for the management of the company's 20 UK-based data centres, the answer would seem to be: 'a great deal'. He has had to oversee an explosion in complexity and processing...

Building IT's new fabric.
August 10, 2005... The evolution of the IT function over the last five years has been anything but smooth. Since Y2K and the dot com demise, there has been intense pressure on IT directors to take cost out of their operations. And those pressures have prompted...

Evolving the data centre.
August 10, 2005... One of Texan billionaire Michael Dell's favourite mottos is "EFP" - every freaking penny - and it is religiously observed at a company which has built its global reputation on delivering high value products at economic prices. It may make life...

HP's big cost cut.(Hewlett-Packard)
August 10, 2005... When a company boasts of having reaped cost savings in the millions or even billions of dollars, observers, in an industry conscious of the need for belt-tightening, tend to sit up and take notice. With its $19 billion acquisition of Compaq...

A question of policy.
August 10, 2005... Were it any other part of the business, the data centre may well not have a future, says Bill McColl, founder and chief technology officer at policy-driven data centre automation vendor, Sychron. To many parts of the business looking in,...

Charitable aims.(information management of business enterprises)
August 10, 2005... Most mid-sized and large companies rely on data centre services for the smooth running of every business day. The workloads placed on the data centre tend to show occasional peaks and troughs throughout the year; for the most part though,...

Pay as you go computing.
August 10, 2005... Utility computing aims to solve many of the data centre manager's biggest headaches, such as low utilisation and lack of scalability. But there is one major problem impeding adoption. Neither vendors nor internal IT departments supplying their...

The grid equation.
August 10, 2005... Grid technology, in theory, promises to revolutionise computing. By being able to power their applications using a pool of computers spread out across a loosely connected network, even modest users should be able access unprecedented processing...

Raw energy.(industrial forecast of data centers)
August 10, 2005... In conversations about the future of the data centre, two spectres threaten to undermine many of the more promising developments: heat and power. Too much of one and too little of the other. With the advent of dense processing...

Escaping the heat.
August 10, 2005... Data centre physics is simple. The electricity required to process data turns to heat. The problem is that the speed at which that data can be pumped through modern devices - servers, routers, storage devices and so on - is such that data...

A virtual necessity.(current analysis of data centers)
August 10, 2005... The data centre is currently under threat from being swamped by a deluge of data, warns John Kelley, CEO of storage switch maker McData. But the next two years look set to provide a testing ground for technologies that will alter storage...

The cost killer.
August 10, 2005... We're onto something that people find pretty exciting. This has been going like crazy," said Rob McCormick, the CEO of the US data centre services company Savvis, a few days before the Information Age Future of the Data Centre conference. ...

Completing the jigsaw.
August 10, 2005... As the delivery of IT as a service becomes more widespread, the option of outsourcing the data centre is regarded as increasingly attractive. With data centre managers having to deal with vast amounts of stored data and an explosion in the...

Bare necessities.
August 10, 2005... Complexity," says Vern Brownell, founder and chief technology officer of data centre technology provider Egenera, "is the number one problem in the data centre." It is the source of high capital costs, the driver of even higher operational...

Financial results analysis in June 2005.
August 10, 2005... June is always a fallow month in the reporting calendar. And the few dozen major high-tech companies that do turn in their quarterly or half-yearly numbers provide an eclectic mix. No more so than IT infrastructure company dimension data...

IT spending trends.(reports on global spending on information technology)(Brief Article)
August 10, 2005... Global spending on IT is set to reach $2.6 trillion in 2005 - a 5.6% rise on 2004 levels, according to industry analyst Gartner. But the figures also indicate that investment in Western European countries lags behind their global counterparts,...

CRM trends.(customer relationship management)(Brief Article)
August 10, 2005... The customer relationship management (CRM) market is reaching maturity, with price pressures and weak demand stifling growth, according to IDC. In its latest figures the analyst house predicts that annual growth in the market is unlikely to...

Handheld devices trends.(Brief Article)
August 10, 2005... The market for handheld devices looks to be in terminal decline, as buyers lose interest in PDAs (personal digital assistants) with limited functionality. According to figures from market tracker IDC, shipments of handheld devices fell 12.1% in...

Enterprise router trends.(demands and revenue)(Brief Article)
August 10, 2005... Demand for enterprise routers remains high, particularly for products with built-in security features, according to the latest figures from communications industry analyst group, Infonetics Research. But revenues across the sector continue to...

The Effective Organization.
August 10, 2005... The past few years have seen a lot of soul-searching about the value that IT contributes to the business. Much of that has been stirred by the so-called 'productivity paradox', which suggests that, when assessed against traditional metrics, IT...

IBM's chip challenge.
August 10, 2005... The decision by Apple - a long time supporter - to abandon IBM's PowerPC architecture in favour of processor giant Intel, raises serious questions over IBM's chip strategy. The loss of the Apple business is not going to bring IBM Micro-...

Cisco launches the network for the SOA.(service oriented application)
August 10, 2005... Cisco Systems is developing new technology that will allow network devices to read, interpret and respond to application-layer messages in real-time, potentially easing the application integration burden. Cisco says its application...

In search of ecommerce 2.0.
August 10, 2005... Ecommerce has come a long way since the mid-1990s, when the phrase was first coined. Strangely, 10 years on, there still appears to be little understanding in the minds of many senior managers (outside of IT) as to why it should be such a big...

A winnable war?(security measures of information technology services industry)
August 10, 2005... The battle to secure the enterprise has come to resemble an arms race: the latest technologies to combat threats give rise to new forms of attacks and malware. And some combatants are losing hope of ever winning the war. "I used to boast...

A secure future?
August 10, 2005... During a debate at the Information Age Enterprise Security 2005 conference in London, the expert panellists were asked if they thought the information security war was being won or lost. In spite of their desire to be optimistic, the four...

The car in front is more secure.
August 10, 2005... Last year, security systems vendor, FSecure, tested the security of some of today's increasingly IT-loaded cars. Toyota's petrol and electric-engine hybrid, the Prius, which contains more electronics than some departmental servers, passed the...

Perimeterless security in action.
August 10, 2005... Deperimeterisation has become the latest buzzword garnering interesting in IT security management, but it is also attracting controversy. Its central proposition is that the current approach to information security is untenable given the...

Passing the security test.(security standards)
August 10, 2005... The security priorities for IT decision-makers can be plainly stated: to allow the business to operate unfettered by security issues while protecting it from threats. However, the task of developing a strategy to meet those priorities can be...

The right risk?
August 10, 2005... Executive boards have witnessed the brouhaha that has accompanied every latest virus outbreak, and have had their collective minds focused by the slew of compliance legislation hitting the organisation. But they still expect every penny of...

Protecting the enterprise.(information management)
August 10, 2005... Five years ago, when Martin Roberts first took charge of security at BT, he quickly got to know just how extreme the threats to the company could be. In the early hours of one Saturday morning, a month into the job, he received a call informing...

Balancing risk and performance.(Brief Article)
August 10, 2005... Eighteen months ago, at Information Age's inaugural IT security conference, the opening speakers spent the first sessions reviewing the year in high-tech crime. On their list of pain points were hacking, viruses, Internet fraud and denial of...

All things must pass.(International Business Machines Corp.)
August 10, 2005... During a visit to a data centre recently, the company's CIO mentioned to me in passing that the computer giant IBM was "ending support for SNA next year". For me, this was almost a Proustian moment, with the now obscure acronym reviving, in my...

VoIP adoption trends.(Brief Article)
August 10, 2005... North American VoIP (voice-over-Internet Protocol) service revenue topped $1.3 billion in 2004 and is expected to soar to $19.9 billion by 2009 - a 1,400% increase, according to Infonetics Research. "VoIP services are relatively new to the...

SSA Global: Vibrant life after death.(SSA Global Technologies Inc.)
August 10, 2005... A certain class of equity investment group has, in recent times, gained an appetite for acquiring technology companies and taking them private. The companies are then subjected to rigorous restructuring before a revitalised business can be spun...

The Brave New World of eHR.(Book Review)
August 10, 2005... Internet technology has brought numerous efficiencies to business, from agile supply chains to lean purchasing processes. But while human resources (HR) applications are often seen as merely an adjunct to this organisational streamlining, it is...

The Black Book on Corporate Security.(Book Review)
August 10, 2005... Security threats to the business are multiplying faster than the technologies designed to counter them - as soon one virus has been identified and a solution established, two more come forward to take its place. Amid this rapidly evolving...

Excelling in intelligence.(managing business intelligence )
August 10, 2005... It is one of the fundamentals of business management but one which many argue is often not up to the job. The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is the workhorse of corporate decision-making, but its ease of use and familiar interface means that users...

Elevated status.
August 10, 2005... Compliance and the exponential growth of information: two themes that come up time and again in many different sectors of corporate IT. Within the enterprise content management (ECM) industry they have immense importance and are the two...

EMC displays its new colours.(Company Profile)
August 10, 2005... There have been many remarkable changes at storage giant EMC since Joe Tucci took the helm in 2001. The fact that Tucci has overseen a turnaround in financial performance - moving from a $500 million loss in fiscal 2001 to a $871 million profit...

Sun embarks on shopping spree.
August 10, 2005... Sun Microsystems has finally revealed its acquisition plans, putting its $7.4 billion cash mountain to use. However, market watchers have been left perplexed over the choice of targets. Firstly Sun revealed that it had reached an agreement...

Security horizons.(survey on information security)
August 10, 2005... If there is one big corporate, IT-related issue that affects every member of staff, most customers and deeply troubles both IT and non-IT management, it is information security. No one wants to be part of, or to do business with, any...

Business as usual.(Information technology services industry)(Brief Article)
August 10, 2005... Europe's leadership of IT industry growth, established in May, was short lived, as the US-dominated global index regained poll position in June. According to the Infoconomy Index, growth at a global level held steady at 9.5% - roughly where it...

Month in review.(Information technology services industry)
August 10, 2005... BT agreed a deal with communications regulator Ofcom to provide competitors with greater access to its local networks, raising the possibility of cheaper telephone calls. In exchange, Ofcom has mothballed threats to break up BT. Among the...