Information Age (London, UK) articles from December 2004

Information Age (London, UK) archives from December 2004

RSA's brave new federated world.(RSA Security)
December 10, 2004... Headline-grabbing security breaches have always been a good opportunity for vendors to get a bit of free advertising. News of security flaws on online banking sites Cahoot and Morgan Stanley was soon leapt upon by RSA Security, who said that...

Quark has customer service epiphany.(Quark Systems)
December 10, 2004... When Kamar Aulakh took over as CEO of publishing software specialist Quark Systems in January 2004, the first thing he did was speak to customers to find out what they thought of the company and to get advice on the direction it should take....

Market data.(IDC, the research analyst group, suggests that the market for blade servers will reach $9 billion by 2008)
December 10, 2004... As server technology evolves, it buyers are starting to acknowledge the potential value of introducing blade servers in large numbers into their IT infrastructures. IDC, the research analyst group, suggests that the market for blade servers...

Disaster recovery.(importance of disaster recovery measures among companies worldwide has risen, survey reports)
December 10, 2004... Awareness of the importance of disaster recovery (DR) measures among companies worldwide has risen this year, but many strategies still have major shortcomings. According to a survey conducted by IT industry watcher Dynamic Markets on...

Spending plans for 2005.(organisations expect to increase their Information Technology spending in 2005)(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... The majority of UK organisations expect to increase their IT spending in 2005 - although a recent survey points to several sectors where there will be little if any growth in budgets. Of the 168 executives responding to the National...

The death of architecture.
December 10, 2004... In 1943 Thomas Watson, IBM's founder and president, assessed the commercial potential of ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer. "I think," Watson is reputed to have said, "there is a world market for maybe five computers." Today,...

The services advantage.(utility computing is becoming the mantra, lately but strongly giving businesses an oppuritinity to restructure their information resources)
December 10, 2004... Utility computing, at its simplest, offers businesses the opportunity to structure their IT infrastructure to meet varying levels of demand. And that presents IT management with a clear choice for delivering this: either to develop an internal...

Workplace stress.(a survey shows chief information officers are more pressurised people )(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... Acounting scandals, management reshuffles, impending criminal charges - it's been a pretty stressful time for some executives at Computer Associates. It is something of a surprise, then, to see that Islandia, New York-headquartered CA is one of...

Readers' letters.(Letter to the Editor)
December 10, 2004... In your cover story in September, 'The lawless Internet', you say that, in the early days of the Internet, people thought it would be tamed. It is my view that this says more about people's ignorance and aspirations than anything else. I...

The desktop dilemma.
December 10, 2004... Systems management software vendors are predicting that advances in their technology will soon improve data centre administrator productivity by 100%; they also suggest they will deliver similarly large improvements in systems utilisation. But...

Grid gets big.
December 10, 2004... Grid computing started some years ago as an academic effort to build supercomputing on the cheap by using many smaller processors coordinated to tackle numerically intense computer problems. This technical approach is only useful for...

The drivers towards utility IT.(Information Technology)
December 10, 2004... Take a look through the portfolios of Silicon Valley's venture capitalists. As the VCs once again take bets on the startups that are tipped to provide the next wave of hot technologies, one common theme jumps out. Names such Azul, BladeLogic,...

Utility speak.
December 10, 2004... IBM-led initiative based on the concept of computer systems being 'self-aware'. Systems are able to provision and reconfigure resources with little or no human interaction (see Self-managing systems). A pared down server that packs tightly...

Hot box evolution.(Global Server Market booms)
December 10, 2004... After six consecutive quarters of growth in the global server market, it seems fair to assume that the post dot-com bust era of IT austerity is finally over. A fair assumption: but is it accurate? IDC's latest server market health check...

On the grid.
December 10, 2004... Start-up Axceleon provides resource management software for enabling the distributed execution of applications across grids and clusters, maximising server use. Key product: EnFuzion Just emerging from stealth mode, Azul offers appliances...

Blades fuel Continental.(Continental Airlines Inc.)
December 10, 2004... Experience at Continental Airlines has shown that a relatively modest increase in advertising doubles the hits it gets on its online sales web site. Consequently, Continental now generates over $1 billion of sales a year through the public...

Mazda on the starting grid.(Mazda Motor Corp.)
December 10, 2004... Multinational car giant Mazda operates as a collection of small country-based units, bound together through its Japanese corporate headquarters. At that hub, it has over 100 servers, used for all kinds of tasks from marketing to dealer...

Total cost of utility.
December 10, 2004... As most CIOs will acknowledge, pressure is still being exerted on IT departments to deliver more value from their budgets, but they are being allocated little in the way of additional funds to drive this extra value. It is therefore reasonably...

The software question.
December 10, 2004... Software: web services and composite apps enable business services Today's applications delay or prevent business changes with incompatible technologies and proprietary, expensive integration technologies. To get past these issues, firms...

Extreme IT: supercomputers.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... The 17th annual Supercomputing conference takes place in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania from 6 to 12 November 2004, with all eyes on which project will top the list of the 500 fastest supercomputers. Competition, as always, is fierce, with at...

The drive to centralise.
December 10, 2004... The degree to which IT systems are centralised is tidal. For the past two decades IT buyers consistently moved away from monolithic, centrally controlled projects and invested in cheap, easy to implement decentralised, distributed systems. But...

Making IT virtual.
December 10, 2004... Physically consolidating computer resources in the data centre can simplify the management of servers; it cannot address the problem of optimising utilisation. This requires a further step: virtualisation. Systems virtualisation is not a...

Mergers &acquisitions: October 2004.
December 10, 2004... In that light, Computer Associates' decision to acquire identity management software vendor Netegrity is no surprise. But the deal bears closer inspection. By offering $340 million for Netegrity, CA is paying over five times its 2003 revenues....

The autonomic environment.(server management is becoming a challenge as computer architectures are becoming sophisticated )
December 10, 2004... As IT architectures become increasingly sophisticated, with the proliferation of grid and utility networks, managing the sheer number of servers will be a huge challenge. The solution, according to some is self-managing, self-healing,...

Polycom mixes up the desktop video formula.
December 10, 2004... When it comes to collaborative office technologies, the watchword for many years has been 'patience'. Patience on the part of the users, as they wait for all the promised technologies of voice, video, data, conferencing and collaboration to...

McData fights for a return to glory.
December 10, 2004... While the overall storage area network (SAN) market has been gathering pace, competition in its fibre channel switch segment has been open warfare, with one of the sectors' pioneers, McData, taking on the mighty Cisco. Some commentators...

Commerce One completes its final transaction.
December 10, 2004... Commerce One has gone through one of the most prolonged and painful deaths of any IT company. From its heady dot-com heyday to its filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the business-to-business software company enjoyed an eventful and...

HDS embraces interoperability.(Hitachi Data Systems Corp)
December 10, 2004... The storage market is characterised by an odd paradox: as the cost per megabyte of stored data continues to fall, storage becomes ever more difficult to manage. With the development of tiered storage systems, where data is assigned to the...

Point of contact.(contact centers)
December 10, 2004... Suppliers of contact centre software are in a quandary. Having spent the last five years predicting a massive shift to contact centres based entirely on the Internet Protocol (IP) standard - and re-engineering their products in line with that...

Comms Czar: A new number for the CIO.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology will have a far-reaching impact beyond lowering telephone bills. It will change the role of the CIO, say analysts at Gartner. The migration of voice onto IP networks means it effectively becomes an IT...

Tag - you're it.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... New technologies frequently cause both disquiet and excitement in equal measure, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips are no different. These tiny radio transmitters have been suggested as suitable for tracking all manner of...

“Linux will damage your nation's economy”.
December 10, 2004... Steve Ballmer, the CEO of software giant Microsoft, loves to hit the buyer's emotional touchpoints. Back in 2000, European Union governments signed the Lisbon Agenda, which set out a ten year plan to become the world's most competitive...

Stealth attack by 'bot army'.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... When it comes to security, no news is good news, or so it was thought. In fact 'no news' is turning out to be something altogether more sinister in the world of IT security. The latest analysis from security company Symantec indicates that...

Step-by-step utility.(utility computing)
December 10, 2004... For many businesses, the realisation of utility computing, where processing power can be turned off and on as required, seems light-years away. Legacy infrastructures are so deeply entrenched that a shift from today's distributed and disparate...

The bite-sized ecosystem.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... Software suppliers readying their products for the 'service-oriented architecture' are facing some huge challenges, advisory company Gartner is warning. Not only must they break their software down into bite-size chunks as clients move away...

Charging ahead.(charging models for utility computing)
December 10, 2004... The two main approaches to utility computing - internal and external - have different charging and usage models. But the complexities of developing the charging models are common to both. The internal model of utility computing relies on...

The grid roadmap.(grid computing)
December 10, 2004... Grid computing - with its promise to organisations that they will able to utilise their own (and external) resources more efficiently to cope with peaks and troughs in demand - is a sufficiently attractive concept to appeal to both CIO and CFO...

CIOs alive and thriving.(Chief information officers)
December 10, 2004... A few years ago, at a conference that Information Age helped to organise, I witnessed a brief exchange of views that has stuck in my mind ever since. A senior salesman from a top US software company asked a question of one of the...

The blade revolution.(blade servers)
December 10, 2004... The notion of an it infrastructure capable of provisioning resources in near-real time has won backers among almost all platform technology suppliers. That systems agility will be fuelled by sophisticated systems management tools and...

Enterprise search tools.
December 10, 2004... Tools for searching through oceans of corporate information have been around since the dawn of the IT industry. Initial mechanisms for extracting fixed length records from 'flat files' or hierarchical databases gave way in the 1980s to...

Dear Valued Customer.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 10, 2004... The value proposition of this book is perhaps a little thin: Impress colleagues and friends with a series of (sometimes) hilarious, (frequently) preposterous anecdotes of technology gone horribly wrong. Over 300 pacy pages, Rick Broadhead...

RFID Labeling.
December 10, 2004... As new technologies go, RFID - radio frequency identification - has had a more rapid rise than most. Not only have the electronic tracking tags provoked outrage from privacy activists, attracting mainstream press attention, their acceptance as...

Common approach, uncommon results.(Book Review)
December 10, 2004... It is a sad fact for businesses that all too often essential improvement programmes, from software rollouts to business process outsourcing, fail to deliver the intended results. There have been many attempts to find reasons for this; Common...

In search of stupidity.
December 10, 2004... If Microsoft is so widely reviled, how did it achieve its dominant position in the software industry? For many, the answer lies in notions of abuse of power, in double-dealing, in unfair competition and in the lack of adequate vision by...

Financial results.
December 10, 2004... Given that it is toiling under the strain of an 17 month-long hostile assault, PeopleSoft has proved itself the exception by producing a startling set of results for its third quarter. Even its unwelcome suitor, Oracle, was impressed enough to...

Mad metrics.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... People manage their email in very individualistic ways. But recent 'research' identifies four basic types of email user, with the survey's author, unified messaging vendor TopCall, unable to resist the temptation to associate these with animal...

Month in review.
December 10, 2004... Up to 7,000 companies worldwide are paying organised criminals 'protection money' to ensure their corporate web sites are not compromised, claimed the SANS Institute, the US independent security organisation. An average of $40,000 is being paid...

IT for free.
December 10, 2004... Microsoft is locked in a philosophical - and semantic - struggle in which it argues that its own products have a lower cost of ownership than those of rivals that are, in fact, available free to download. To support this assertion, the...

Utilising IT.
December 10, 2004... Utility computing has been one of the hottest topics on the CIO agenda in recent years and was the main focus of debate at Information Age's most recent lunchtime panel discussion. Participants with backgrounds in a broad range of industries...

The 'free lunch' club...
December 10, 2004... For management outside of IT, the threat that open source is posing to Microsoft and other commercial software companies is a sideshow. All that matters to such techno-agnostics is that the software delivers business value - not always...

Fund raising.(imformation technology)
December 10, 2004... Analysts have been running the numbers, and they look good - at least by the standards of recent years. Almost across the board, IT spending plans for 2005 are "optimistic", say European IT managers in one recent survey by industry watcher...

Secure in the knowledge...(information security)
December 10, 2004... With the firewall up, the 'holistic' security management policy in place and the system scrutinised regularly for vulnerabilities, it is easy to see why organisations might get complacent about information security. But a recent high-profile...

Rexam.(Interview)
December 10, 2004... Information Age (IA): You say IT is a key differentiator at Rexam. To what extent is that view accepted throughout the business? Paul Martin (PM): When I arrived five years ago, Rexam did not invest in IT. I was fortunate that, when I...

Infoconomy Index: European IT escapes from recession.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... European-based IT suppliers have confirmed their full exit from recession. According to the Infoconomy Index for October, Europe's indigenous vendors showed an aggregate growth rate of 2.3%, up from 0.8% in the previous month. The pace...

When only 3G will do.
December 10, 2004... For Property Intelligence, providing roaming employees with adequate bandwidth has been an ongoing challenge. The business, which runs the online commercial property information service Focus, has staff constantly on the road around the UK,...

The WMD detective.(weapon of mass destruction)
December 10, 2004... "A computer is like a weapon of mass destruction. Capability is no longer the issue. The issue is intent." So says Tom Noonan, founder and CEO of Internet Security Systems (ISS). And if that may sound like the scaremongering typical of...

The new budgetary landscape.
December 10, 2004... A recent report published by the Research &Advisory Services division of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) lays out a new budgetary landscape for IT. It points out the dangers inherent in continuing to base financial planning around an...

European IT services market top 10.(Information technology)(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... US companies continues to lead the IT services market in Western Europe, even as competition from indigenous suppliers increases. According to analyst group IDC, the top four revenue generators come from the US, while five of the remaining...

The compliance crunch.(information management)
December 10, 2004... Every month, Information Age invites 20 IT directors, CIOs and others with core responsibility for IT decisions to share their views and experiences on strategic issues. The roundtable debates are held under the so-called Chatham House Rule so...

Outsource your job.(Information technology)(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... There have been many strange stories relating to off-shore outsourcing, often spreading fear into the minds of those looking at this cost saving measure. In spite of numerous surveys that suggest outsourcing overseas actually creates jobs in...

Month in review.
December 10, 2004... An end to the saga of Oracle's attempted takeover of PeopleSoft seemed to be in sight, as District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against the US Department of Justice's (DoJ) decision to block the hostile bid on competitive grounds. In a harsh...

Offshore outsourcing.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... Demand for offshore outsourcing will more than double over the next four years, rising from $7 billion to $17 billion. An analysis by research company IDC also shows that businesses that have initially looked to outsource IT services to...

E-government.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... IT spending on e-government initiatives across Western Europe is expected to increase significantly over the next four years as services such as tax collection and citizen interaction are extended. However, levels of commitment tend to vary...

Desktop System Trends.(Brief Article)
December 10, 2004... Corporate spending on PCs is fuelling growth in the desktop systems market as a whole as businesses and government organisations accept that their current platforms are reaching the end of their three to five year lifespan. Analysts at...

Mergers and acquisitions.
December 10, 2004... In the year since Oracle launched a bid for its rival, the two have spent a combined total of $130 million - and this is before any deal goes through. In contrast, IBM (whose last hostile bid was for Lotus a decade ago) has taken a less...