Information Age (London, UK) articles from June 2003

Information Age (London, UK) archives from June 2003

Leading Geeks.(Review)
June 10, 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...

Panorama piggy-backs on Microsoft's OLAP success.
June 10, 2003... When Rony Ross, co-founder of Israeli online analytical processing (OLAP) specialist Panorama Software, approached Microsoft about developing partnership activities in 1996, she came away with a somewhat different proposal. Microsoft offered to...

The <em>Information Age</em> interview.
June 10, 2003... IA: When you started up, why didn't you save money and time by replicating Virgin Mobile's UK system, which was already up and running? MP: We did visit Virgin Mobile in the UK (VMUK) and in Australia (VMA) to understand their experiences,...

McNealy cashes in his chips.
June 10, 2003... The one certainty about definitive strategic promises it is that they will come back to haunt you. Scott McNealy, CEO of systems giant Sun Microsystems, became the latest in a long line of IT executives to prove this rule last month when he...

New role for Wall Street oracle.
June 10, 2003... For years, software CEOs courted his goodwill but lived in fear of his pronouncements. Charles 'Chuck' Phillips, the lead enterprise software analyst at investment bank Morgan Stanley, commanded such respect - from investors, from software...

Firewall and VPN spending continues to rise.
June 10, 2003... The ever-expanding corporate perimeter continues to drive demand for security appliances, firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs), says market analyst In-Stat/MDR. As a result, it expects the firewall/VPN appliance market to grow to $4.1...

The true cost of passwords.
June 10, 2003... Configuring and maintaining 'free' password systems is costing companies between EU100 and EU350 a year, according to a new study by the Aberdeen Group. The analyst group says that password-based authentication systems are supplied with...

Sarbanes-Oxley to drive IT upturn.
June 10, 2003... Large corporations expect to spend more than $2.5 billion in the coming year in a bid to comply with the new accounting rules required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and much of that money will go into information technology projects, according to...

New edition of the bible.
June 10, 2003... When PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) first started its technology forecasts, in the early 1990s, they quickly gained a reputation as something of a technology bible. Barely a sector of corporate IT went uncovered and the resulting report was...

Performance in focus.
June 10, 2003... Seven out of 10 organisations fail to execute on their strategy, according to business intelligence guru David Norton, inventor of the balanced scorecard approach to business monitoring. The reason? They lack adequate management tools. ...

Perfect visibility.
June 10, 2003... Very soon, the technology that underpins Cisco Systems' much-hyped 'virtual close' will begin to look quaint and old-fashioned. Not only will every company be doing it, but they will be doing it better, using the emerging extensible...

Job market shows signs of recovery.
June 10, 2003... Whisper it, but the IT jobs market in the UK may have turned a corner after two years of decline. Statistics from recruitment site CWJobs show that the number of permanent IT vacancies advertised in the first quarter of 2003 climbed 4%. It was...

Nauseating times.
June 10, 2003... It was probably not the most tactful of phrases to 'bring up' over the dinner table. But the rotten economy is forcing hardware makers to 'puke' their surplus kit onto online auctions, according to Sanjay Kumar, CEO of Computer Associates (CA),...

Expert advice.
June 10, 2003... Question: Our IT department is having trouble gaining board-level approval for a major security investment. How do we convince them? Answer: In this negative economic climate, getting board-level buy-in for any major technology investment...

Temporary stutter.
June 10, 2003... The fortunes of the IT industry are going to get slightly worse before they get better, judging by the Infoconomy Global Index in May. The Index, which tracks the combined revenue growth of the world's 200 largest publicly listed IT...

BSc in virus writing.
June 10, 2003... Everybody knows that students can be a menace at times, but their antisocial behaviour is usually confined to removing the odd traffic cone. Until now. Computer science students in Calgary, Canada are to be given classes in how to write...

Symantec's sales boom, but problems still loom.
June 10, 2003... When John Thompson succeeded Gordon Eubanks as CEO of Symantec in April 1999, he wasted no time in making his mark. Hardly had Thompson got his feet under the table, than he had decided on a radical re-orientation of the company from a...

The lure of offshore.
June 10, 2003... Just sit for an hour in the lobby of any business hotel in Bangalore or Bombay if you want to get a sense of the excitement, advises Kees Ten Nijenhuis, VP of enterprise sales in Europe at Wipro, one of India's 'big five' offshore outsourcing...

ERP market in decline.
June 10, 2003... Back in 2000, Commerce One CEO Mark Hoffman was forecasting a major shake-out in the computer industry. But he could not have thought that his company would be one of the victims. Indeed, by the end of the summer, the vultures might well be...

Higher intelligence.
June 10, 2003... Who are our most profitable customers? Which products deliver the best margins? How successful was our first-quarter marketing campaign? What is our current quarter-to-date sales total? At most businesses, the answers to these and other...

The best-laid plans.
June 10, 2003... Best practice business planning When it comes to best-practice adoption of business performance management strategies in European organisations, budgeting, forecasting and planning are leading the charge, according to Nigel Montgomery of IT...

Keeping score.
June 10, 2003... There is a new twist to the management truism "you can't manage what you can't measure". In an era of uncertainty in business environments and paranoia about corporate governance, the phrase has been adapted to read: "You can't account for what...

Paperless office postponed.
June 10, 2003... It doesn't happen that often, but every now and again, business is hit by a big problem that can only be solved by information technology. And in 2003, the biggest single problem that organisations are facing is not security, or integration, or...

SAP takes aim at SMBs with Business One.
June 10, 2003... SAP's latest advertising campaign spells it out very clearly. Procter &Gamble runs SAP, Lufthansa runs SAP, Adidas runs SAP: all of them major companies with big IT budgets and highly complex business processes. So when the German...

The emergence of ECM.
June 10, 2003... Back in the year 2000, one respected IT analyst, contacted by Information Age to discuss an article on enterprise content management (ECM), said he couldn't help: "No one is interested," he said. How quickly things change. Document and...

SBS still sniffs the big time despite BPO headaches.
June 10, 2003... When Siemens Business Services (SBS) won the UK's biggest public sector outsourcing contract in 1999, it sent a message to the 'big four' services suppliers: Four just became five. Under the 15-year, GBP1 billion 'mega-deal', SBS undertook...

Avaya tries to woo IP telephony migrants.
June 10, 2003... Lucent spin-off and telephony products manufacturer Avaya faces a challenging conundrum, one that many vendors in changing markets often confront and frequently mismanage: how to sell a convincing story to potential buyers of a range of new...

Crunch point.
June 10, 2003... Apple is irrelevant. That is the almost universal belief of corporate IT buyers. Its systems use a proprietary operating system instead of the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows; they don't run standard software; they don't fit into corporate...

Controlling chaos.
June 10, 2003... Computing architectures have never been so complex. Emerging concepts such as web services and utility computing promise to revolutionise the way organisations build and integrate systems, but bring with them one crucial caveat: how to manage...

Month in review.
June 10, 2003... Barry Morris, the charismatic CEO of integration software vendor Iona Technologies, was unceremoniously booted out and replaced by the company's co-founder Dr Chris Horn. Morris presided over the best and worst of times at Iona: first driving...

Stay out of jail.
June 10, 2003... Even by the standards of the technology boom, the case of Lernout & Hauspie was extraordinary. The South Korean unit of L&H, the then market-leading speech-recognition software supplier, reported brisk business in early 2000. Too brisk,...

The peculiar case of SCO.
June 10, 2003... When SCO Group filed a $1 billion suit against IBM in March 2003, it was widely interpreted as a final gambit to try to persuade the systems giant to buy the ailing company. And when SCO CEO Darl McBride started firing off letters to...

Benetton feels privacy heat.
June 10, 2003... When the super model Claudia Schiffer went shopping in a prototype al-electronic 'Extra Future Store' in Germany in April, lots of pictures were taken but no-one got snappy about the implications of the technology. And when Italian fashion...

Divine's final resting place.
June 10, 2003... It is a dramatic turnaround in fortunes, one that in less extraordinary times might have garnered much more attention. Divine, the Internet-incubator turned software company bought up more than 20 software and professional services companies in...

Combating spam.
June 10, 2003... According to Steve Linford, founder of anti-spam blacklist Spamhaus, 90% of all the spam infesting networks in Europe and North America can be traced to a hardcore of about 180 "spam gangs". Most hardcore spammers are middlemen, hired by...

The Maverick and his Machine.(Review)
June 10, 2003... In February 1913, the future looked less than bright for Thomas J Watson. After a three-month trial held in a US district court in Cincinnati, Ohio, the 38-year old Watson - along with 29 of his colleagues from the National Cash Register...

Writ large.
June 10, 2003... When Amazon.com published a book review by lawyer John Lowenthal, it cannot have thought too much of it, even if his review of the book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era, was particularly damning. After all,...

GoldenGate eases data synchronisation.
June 10, 2003... When Tandem developer Eric Fish was given a project that involved synchronising large volumes of data between the databases of various Tandem machines, he was more than a little daunted. The Tandem database is optimised for the storage of...

Execution time.(Review)
June 10, 2003... There is a divide that most organisations struggle to span. Senior executives - inspired by management 'off-sites', analyst advice, guru vision, and a sheer passion for the business - have no shortage of strategic plans for where they want to...

Readers' letters.
June 10, 2003... Failing the test I read with great interest your feature on the UK's 10 worst web application failures (Information Age, May 2003), but was unsurprised to see that poor and insufficient testing was a significant causal factor in a number...