Information Age (London, UK) articles from February 2005

Information Age (London, UK) archives from February 2005

Empowering mobile workers.
February 10, 2005... Arguments in favour of mobile working projects are often backed by headline-grabbing numbers. Vendors talk of employees saving one to two hours a day, or of adding thousands of pounds', dollars' or euros' worth of productivity. The truth...

Instant messaging.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2005... As business users increasingly adopt instant messaging (IM) as a means of communication with colleagues and partners, employees are unwittingly exposing their companies to the threat of viruses, worms and dangerous spam. A recent survey...

World view.(Texas Instruments Inc. to have staff from around the world)
February 10, 2005... Around 2000, semiconductor giant Texas Instruments (TI) took the decision to centralise its globally dispersed IT helpdesks at a single location in Dallas. Even though the working language of the company is English, with manufacturing, design...

Facing the public.(information technology in public sectors)
February 10, 2005... The public sector is thriving in its innovative use of IT. Government-backed reformers such as Sir Peter Gershon and Sir Michael Lyons have increased the appetite to do things in radically new and different ways, and a huge programme of change...

A burning issue.(blade server heat malfunction)
February 10, 2005... According to some server vendors, customers mount as many as 280 blade servers into a single 42 unit rack. That may seem very appealing to organisations with high real estate costs and a desire to manage fewer units. But the downside is that by...

Blogs and wikis.(internet technologies)
February 10, 2005... THE Internet is evolving, and finally showing signs of delivering some of the interactivity that has been promised since its inception. At the forefront of this evolution are technologies like weblogs (online diaries usually referred to as...

Storage systems.(storage area networks usage expected to increase)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2005... In 2004, the penetration of storage area networks (SANs) in core business markets has crossed the 50% line for the first time. According to research by storage market consultancy Macarthur Stroud International, 57% of all mid-sized and large...

Application testing.(software testing methodologies changing)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2005... Organisations are increasingly moving away from the traditional approach of using in-house teams to test software at the end of a development cycle and are embracing more risk-sensitive approaches that exploit professional testing resources -...

Financial results.(Research in Motion Ltd.)
February 10, 2005... Revenues for RIM's third-quarter rose a stunning 138% over the same period in fiscal 2004 to $365.9 million, with 387,000 BlackBerry devices sold. At the same time, net income jumped 554% year-onyear, from $16.3 million to $90.4 million. ...

The EU's pump primers.(communication and technologial development analysis)
February 10, 2005... What should Europe's place be in the technology world? Should its politicians and public sector mandarins try to shape the future of commerce and society by supporting the development and implementation of advanced technology to enhance...

In pursuit of alignment.(business service management)
February 10, 2005... IT organisations have historically struggled to harmonise the functions of the IT backroom with the business processes they serve. But as core business operations have become ever more dependent on the IT infrastructure, that has had to change...

Mobile working.(Mobile workers perform better than their deskbound counterparts, survey)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2005... Mobile workers are more productive than their deskbound counterparts, according to a global research by the Economist Intelligence Unit Over 70% of the 1,500 workers surveyed consider access to mobile technology as either important or critical...

The VoIP challenge.(voice over internet protocol)
February 10, 2005... For the past decade, a spectre has haunting the world's big telecoms companies. It is called packetisation. Packetisation means that voice calls, whether over fixed or mobile networks, can be bundled up as IP (internet protocol) packets and...

Lloyd's voice revolution.(Lloyd's of London installed voice over internet protocol technology)
February 10, 2005... Voice over IP (VoIP) is one of those technologies that has been a long time coming. Although it has been possible to packetise and route voice calls for at least a decade, fears over reliability and cost prevented most corporates from taking...

Peak practice.(Newcastle Building Society used IP call routing technology to manage its call center)
February 10, 2005... Most examples of converged IP networks focus on the substantial benefits that can be achieved merely by routing voice calls over non-billable networks. But a few pioneers have gone beyond this. The Newcastle Building Society (NBS), for...

FastWeb races ahead.
February 10, 2005... Talk to almost any expert about the future of European telecommunications, and sooner or later, the name 'FastWeb' will come up, usually spoken of in reverential terms. The Italian company, which started inauspiciously as a joint venture...

Always available.
February 10, 2005... The age of infinite bandwidth has been predicted, and sought after, for a long time. But in spite of huge investment and technical innovation, bandwidth has always been a limited, expensive resource. And like all limited resources, access to it...

The business challenge.
February 10, 2005... Modern enterprise networks are changing - and changing fast. Most modern enterprises are now replacing their patchwork of often incompatible networks with a faster, seamless and standardised one that carries all data and voice. At the same...

The quiet revolution.(Brief Article)
February 10, 2005... Sometimes revolutions happen so steadily that, even though they are deep and fundamental, those caught up in them fail to fully pick up on what is happening. In preparing this report, the Information Age editors have felt that something...

The drive to standardise.
February 10, 2005... Over the past decade, enterprise networking, once typified by diversity, has standardised and converged. Rather than choosing from a range of network topologies, the vast majority of businesses today run local area networks (LANs) based on...

Networks move out.
February 10, 2005... They may have had a different word for it, but even in the early days of telephony, businesses "outsourced" their networks. Even if they were allowed to, very few organisations ever managed their own devices to switch voice calls with the...

The rise and rise of mobililty.
February 10, 2005... The increasing popularity of mobile technologies and remote working is no mystery. By equipping staff with devices that allow them to access corporate networks, businesses can ensure time spent away from the office is more productive. Employees...

Converging the network.
February 10, 2005... Back in 2000, upgrading a company network to a single IP (Internet Protocol) backbone would have made scant difference to the working lives of those on the network. But the 'second generation' of IP networks will bring the benefits of converged...

WiFi, 3G or both?
February 10, 2005... At the height of the telecoms boom in 2000, network operators engaged in a vigorous bidding war across Europe to secure licences to operate next-generation 3G mobile services. These promised to satisfy all the voice and data communications...

The power of collaboration.
February 10, 2005... Collaborative technologies are one of the great disappointments of IT. Although many products designed to help people work together have fared moderately well over the past decade, very few have lived up to expectations. But all this may...

Next-generation networks.
February 10, 2005... Enterprise networking is an area that is full of groundbreaking, disruptive innovations. Some of these - such as WiFi and VoIP (voice over IP) have already made a major impact. Here are some others that are starting to shake up the sector - or...

Networking suppliers.
February 10, 2005... Key equipment suppliers: Despite recent attempts to recover high-flier status by targeting the enterprise, 3Com remains strongest in the middle tier, mostly in Europe. Its well-rounded product set covers all but the very highest end of the...

Enterprise networking market profile.
February 10, 2005... The trend towards replacing application-specific networks with converged networks continues, with IP telephony the one 'killer application" that is driving sales. To underline the point, in 2000 there were fewer than 500,000 IP telephony...

The communications czar.
February 10, 2005... peaking at the analyst company's annual IT Symposium last year, Gartner's Neil Rickard foretold a dramatic shift in the role of the CIO. Voice-over-IP technology, Rickard explained, will render telephony an IT application, redefining the way it...

Building strongholds.(Network security )
February 10, 2005... Network security has improved greatly in recent years. But these improvements have been matched by a huge increase in exposure, the number and range of attacks, and the level of risk. Today, it is accepted that networks must be partially...

The human component.(security management)
February 10, 2005... At a recent Information Age conference, delegates were asked if their organisation provided systems to enable staff to work from home. All but one - from the Ministry of Defence - said yes. Communications technology has revolutionised the...

World view.
February 10, 2005... Around the year 2000, semiconductor giant Texas Instruments (TI) took the decision to centralise its globally dispersed IT helpdesks at a single location in Dallas. Even though the working language of the company is English, with manufacturing,...

CIO enthusiasm for offshoring grows.(Chief information officers)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2005... Over a quarter of CIOs have made use of offshore development facilities, and that percentage is rising fast. The 2004 annual CIO survey by IT recruiters Harvey Nash reported that 46% of participants felt their use of outsourcing was likely...

CRM satisfaction.(Customer relationship management)
February 10, 2005... Since its inception in the early 1990s, customer relationship management (CRM) has quickly evolved from being a 'must-have' application that would solve every company's customer service headaches, to being a byword for over-hyped, difficult to...

SAP: A scandalous choice.(software to detect fraud accounting)(Brief Article)
February 10, 2005... Having trouble with the financial regulators? Got a history of suspect accounting practices? Need to restore your tarnished reputation? Then you need squeaky-clean accounts by SAP. The German software maker has become the must-have...

Lion lies with lambs.(Microsoft patches up with other software companies)
February 10, 2005... As we all know, the $37 billion software supergiant Microsoft is not the most universally popular of companies. Even its most trivial of business moves bring on wails of complaint and dark mutterings about unfair business practices, conspiracy...

Month in Review.
February 10, 2005... Security behemoth Symantec confirmed it would buy backup and virtualisation software maker Veritas in a $13.5 billion deal, creating a security, systems and storage management software powerhouse with around $5 billion in annual revenues....