Information Age (London, UK) articles from December 2002

Information Age (London, UK) archives from December 2002

Supply chain vendors suffer as buying habits change.(finance trends)(Brief Article)
December 10, 2002... Plummeting revenues at some of the key supply chain management and manufacturing software vendors indicate that the trend towards signing major deals for multi-function supply chain suites is long gone. Technology buyers now focus on very...

Expert advice.(John Ragsdale, Giga Information Group)(Column)
December 10, 2002... Question: How should my organisation establish a formal metrics programme for our help desk and customer support operations? John Ragsdale, Research director, customer relationship management, Giga Information Group tackles the question:...

Closing the gap.(IT management and budgets )
December 10, 2002... IT management is being squeezed. On one side is the IT infrastructure budget, which at most organisations is pegged or even falling. On the other are the demands of line of business (LOB) managers who are increasingly in control of their own IT...

Hewlett-Packard firms up its soft side.(OpenView systems management software)
December 10, 2002... Company name: Hewlett-Packard HQ: Palo Alto, California Main activity: Systems, software and services Last full year revenues: (2001) $45.2 billion (HP); $33.6 billion (Compaq) Last full year net income: (2001) $408 million...

Computer Associates puts on a brave face.(Charles Wang resigns)
December 10, 2002... "There is almost no asset as important as your reputation". That was the guiding message delivered by Computer Associates (CA) CEO Sanjay Kumar to the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce in Zurich in early November He clearly knew what was...

Saving IT asset management.(information technology)
December 10, 2002... Organisations waste billions of dollars on IT each year. They buy unnecessary software licences, pay for hardware products after their leases have expired, and even dump unwanted equipment in 'corporate mausoleums'. At the same time, employees...

IT services: Contrasting outlooks in US and Europe.(information technology)
December 10, 2002... After one of its most difficult years, the IT services industry is set to return to growth, according to the latest predictions from analyst group Gartner. In 2003, worldwide IT services revenue will reach $591.4 billion, up 6.2% from 2002. The...

Information Builders capitalises on elevated reporting structure.(business intelligence software)(Product/Service Evaluation)
December 10, 2002... IT industry analysts have a name for it: 'robust reporting'. While the task of churning out business reports for an organisation's middle and upper management, usually via an overnight batch run, has always been regarded as the 'grunt' work of...

Oracle takes aim at Microsoft Exchange.(Oracle Collaboration Suite)
December 10, 2002... On the surface, the theme of Oracle's user conference in San Francisco in November looked contradictory: the total cost of owning Oracle products is lower than going with Microsoft, and switching from Oracle will save IT buyers money. Even the...

Time to reassess...(UK Inland Revenue Aspire)
December 10, 2002... In early 2002, the UK Inland Revenue announced the launch of a tender competition, Aspire, to provide technology services to the department when its contracts with current suppliers EDS and Accenture expire in 2004. From the start, this...

Manufacturing software fire-sale.(Symphony Technology Group acquired by Industri-Matematik International)
December 10, 2002... Consolidation in the mid-market manufacturing and supply chain software sector reached new heights in November as low company valuations, underlying economic pressures, and growing competition from enterprise software giants such as SAP, Oracle...

Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?(Louis V. Gerstner, International Business Machines Corp.)(Book Review)
December 10, 2002... When Louis V Gerstner took over as chief executive and chairman of IBM in 1993, the world's largest computer company was in deep, deep trouble. Mainframe sales were collapsing, it was a laughing stock in PCs, its big software initiatives were...

Confluent aims to plug web services gap.(Confluent Software)
December 10, 2002... With every new IT paradigm comes a clutch of start-ups with names supposedly as radical as their technologies. And web services, the revolutionary application development and deployment approach for the 'discovery', assembly and execution of...

IntruVert rebuffs network intruders at speed.(internet anti-virus software)(Product/Service Evaluation)
December 10, 2002... At its peak in early October 2002, the Bugbear virus affected one in 87 emails, wreaking havoc with corporate email systems around the globe. But things would have been worse for some companies if not for IntruVert Networks. The supplier...

The disjointed backbone.(Larry Ellison, Oracle Corp.)
December 10, 2002... Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle, the world's second largest software company, is clearly unsettled. The cause of his concern? The amount of interest that web services - the latest and potentially revolutionary approach to application...

Netfrastructure promises revolution in web apps.(application development software)
December 10, 2002... Jim Starkey will be a familiar name to many database aficionados. Now chief executive at web development software company Netfrastructure, Starkey is renowned as the designer of Digital Equipment's Rdb database, the creator of Interbase's...

Intelligent interaction.(customer relationship management software, Abbey National PLC and WHSmith PLC)(Product/Service Evaluation)
December 10, 2002... Applying for a mortgage can be a frustrating experience. In many cases, customers spend hours filling in an application form, only to wait around for days, even weeks, to find out if their application has been accepted. UK bank Abbey National...

Guerrilla marketing.(BEA WebLogic 7.0 vs. IBM WebSphere 5.0)
December 10, 2002... In its role as the manager of all application operations between users and backend business applications or databases, application server software has become a linchpin technology for almost every organisation. Although most application server...

Netscape: Rest in Peace?(internet server software market share)(Product/Service Evaluation)
December 10, 2002... The Mozilla massacre As of August 2002, Netscape's global usage share had dropped to 3.4 percent, down from 13% a year earlier, and from 32% in 1999, according to an independently produced report from web analytics tools and services...

Utility vehicle.(Sun Microsystems Inc. acquires Terraspring Inc.)(Brief Article)
December 10, 2002... Sun's mid-November acquisition of Terraspring, a privately-held developer of 'infrastructure automation' software based in Fremont, California, is a catch up play by the company in the embryonic utility computing market. IBM and...

Achieving Business Value from Technology.(Book Review)
December 10, 2002... IT spending consistently fails to generate a satisfactory return: at first glance, that is the depressing message of Achieving Business Value from Technology by Tony Murphy. And the author has equally gloomy evidence to support this point of...

Cut and print.(Hewlett-Packard profitable again)(Brief Article)
December 10, 2002... Systems giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) swung back to profit in its fourth quarter of 2002, as the company's headcount reduction programme kicked in and its lucrative printer division continued to deliver strong numbers. Overall, the company...

Arkivio's data storage automation promise.
December 10, 2002... Not all data is equal. To manage data intelligently, organisations need to be able to prioritise and store data according to its value to the business. However, the task of categorising and migrating data between storage devices is incredibly...

Cisco surge.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2002... Network equipment manufacturer Cisco sparked a short burst of technology industry optimism in early November, when it released healthy figures for the first quarter of its fiscal 2003. The company chalked up revenues of $4.8 billion for the...

B2B Exchanges 2.0.(Business to business)(Book Review)
December 10, 2002... Business to business (B2B) exchanges, or e-marketplaces, were the 'next big thing' after the fall of the dot-com model. They promised to connect and streamline trade between buyers and suppliers of almost every type of product. Some even...

The <em>Information Age</em> Interview.(Brona Kernan, Ryanair)(Interview)
December 10, 2002... Information Age (IA): Ryanair carries some 9 million passengers a year, 90% of whom book their tickets over the Internet. Simply managing this volume of online traffic must be a significant challenge in itself. How does the company cope with...