Information Age (London, UK) articles from June 2004

Information Age (London, UK) archives from June 2004

Signs of maturity.(What's This India Business)(Book Review)
June 10, 2004... The sign in the grounds of the GE Capital building in India carries a simple warning: 'Trespassers Will Be Recruited'. The message is only part joke. As a centre for GE's claims processing, credit evaluation, accounting and other clearly...

Does IT Matter?(Book Review)
June 10, 2004... Even before Nicholas Carr's book hit the presses, it was safe to assume three things. First, Does IT matter? will be a bestseller, a fact guaranteed by the wave of controversy that followed the publication of Carr's analysis of the status of IT...

Storage challenges.(Information management)
June 10, 2004... Two years ago a survey of European companies discovered that 56% of their CIOs believed they did not have enough storage. Curiously, at about the same time, the consensus among storage industry analysts was that most organisations typically...

Analyst acuity.(analysts report on changes in the storage sector)
June 10, 2004... The storage sector is going through a period of flux. Here's what the analysts think is going on: Graham Titterington of Ovum on... Information lifecycle management "Information lifecycle management is in for a bumpy ride. The problem...

The maturing of the BRM.(Business Relationship Managers will become more important)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... As IT is sown ever deeper into the fabric of organisations' business processes, the role of business relationship managers (BRMs) will become indispensable, acting as an interface between the CIO and the user community, according to research...

ERP: slight return.(Enterprise Resource Planning software demand increases)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... After more than three years in the doldrums, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market is bouncing back. Demand for such core business applications (that integrate manufacturing, finance, logistics and other activities) is expected...

The rise of WiFi.(Wireless Fidelity technology will become more common across Europe)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... WiFi technology is destined to become much more commonplace across Europe as an increasing number of hotels, airports, retail stores and fast food outlets roll out wireless local area networks (WLANs). According to wireless research company...

Feel good factor.(Information technology)(Survey by CIO Connect finds IT executives are optimistic)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... Painful memories of the IT downturn may still be fresh, but CIOs' capacity for optimism is undimmed. The first annual survey of its kind by CIO Connect, a forum for UK CIOs, has found IT executives are optimistic about the economic outlook,...

Quote/Unquote.
June 10, 2004... "Offshore the CEO!" IBM employees staging an anti-offshore outsourcing protest outside IBM's annual meeting in Rhode Island noisily suggest a lower-cost alternative to Sam Palmisano. "I can't imagine a better outcome for the company."...

Bupa: ILM transfusion.(Information Lifecycle Management)(British United Provident Association Ltd.)
June 10, 2004... As with other healthcare organisations, private healthcare insurance company Bupa amasses vast quantities of records daily in all areas of its business - membership information, patient records, hospital data and claims. With more than seven...

Imperfect hosts.
June 10, 2004... In the not too distant past, a company the size of Galileo, the travel services giant, would have only considered one model for buying a major piece of software, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) package: it would buy a licence...

Sir Steve Redgrave to host award leadership day.( Effective IT Awards 2004)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... Sir Steve Redgrave CBE, the five-times Olympic rowing champion, will be among the hosts of the Effective IT Award winners' Leadership Day, which will be held later in the year. All businesses that reach the final three in this year's...

Mobility: managing risk.(Seminars)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... The benefits of mobile and remote working are widely appreciated, but the security implications are invariably less understood. And with mobile and remote working increasingly at the heart of business processes, the need to develop effective IT...

XML and Web services 2004.(conference organized by Infoconomy)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... Dramatic change is sweeping through the software world: applications are being recast as 'services'; integration and development are converging; and reuse and process automation is changing the economics and practice of software production. ...

Corporate voodoo at CA.(Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar in trouble for financial misreporting)
June 10, 2004... It is some time since the worse excesses of corporate dotcom-boom America were exposed and a handful of those responsible for corporate malfeasance were brought to trial. But in the tail of the comet, some big names continue to find themselves...

IT service 'not always measured by SLAs'.(survey says service level agreements are ineffective)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... The notion of managing IT infrastructure at the service level is gaining ground, but advocates insist there is still a long way to go, not least in how the service delivery is measured. Take a new survey of 140 UK-based IT directors by YouGov,...

The strange case of Manx 3G.(Manx 3G)
June 10, 2004... There was always something a little odd about the third-generation (3G) wireless network on the Isle of Man - for one thing, the fact that it was there at all. Thanks to some free equipment donated by several Japanese manufacturers looking...

Brits get more spam.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... Most people think they receive more unsolicited email, or spam, than others. That may not be the case, but UK people can at least say with certainty that they get a higher volume of spam than their European neighbours. A new piece of...

Letter from America.(who will the information technology establishment support in the US presidential elections?)
June 10, 2004... It is a common myth that California's IT industry is left-leaning, and once again the region is split over who to support in the US presidential elections. Analysts say the IT 'establishment' is likely to support Bush, the Republican...

Uneasy truce <small><a href="http://www.infoconomy.com/content/admin/edit-component.tcl?group_id=94195.">(Edit this)</a></small>.(Microsoft Corp and Sun Microsystems enter into a licensing agreement )
June 10, 2004... Anyone unfamiliar to the IT industry who happened to spot Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy meeting at a San Francisco hotel last month, grinning, shaking hands and swapping gifts, will doubtless have mistaken them for long-lost friends. It would...

Continuing improvement.(for the information technology industry)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... The IT industry is continuing its resurgence. In April, the sector's growth rate -- as measured by the Infoconomy Index -- again climbed higher, jumping to 11.5% from 10.8% in the previous month. As a measure of the strength of that...

Maligned, misaligned or both?
June 10, 2004... For years, observers of IT in practice have talked about the business-IT divide, and bemoaned its damaging effects on the many, many organisations affected. And almost universally, they have put the blame squarely on IT, rather than business....

Month in Review - May 2004.(Computer industry news)
June 10, 2004... Computer Associates (CA) chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar was demoted to chief software architect against the backdrop of a long-running federal probe into the company's accounting practices. Board member Lewis Ranieri became chairman, but CA...

Secure devices.
June 10, 2004... Security on mobile devices keeps hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons. A recent report in The Times suggested that two of the most popular Bluetooth-enabled mobiles - Sony Ericsson's T610 and Nokia's 6310 - could be vulnerable to...

More than a game.(online games on mobile phones are big business)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... Online games are big business for the mobile phone networks. According to the world's biggest, Vodafone, subscribers to its Live! data service downloaded three million games within the first nine months of its global launch. Each of those games...

WiFi hot spots.(public access points for wireless fidelity continue to grow)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2004... Soon, anyone in a major UK city should be no more than a few hundred yards from a wireless hot spot. The growth of public WiFi access points continues apace. And Gartner, the market research group, estimates that the number of people using them...

Email everywhere.
June 10, 2004... Last month saw both Vodafone and T-Mobile launch their first commercial third generation (3G) services in the UK, both based around data cards giving laptop users high-speed access to the Internet. The operators are keen to publicise support...

XML: Extensible mark-up language.
June 10, 2004... The sudden boom in the web during the 1990s brought home to many vendors and many within IT organisations the value of a document format that could be read by virtually any other application. The web's HTML document format is text-based and...

BPM market matures.(business process management, acquisitions)
June 10, 2004... A significant merger can mean that a particular IT market is maturing. So Tibco's [pounds sterling]128 million takeover of Staffware could one day be seen as the moment the emerging business process management (BPM) sector crossed over into the...

Financial results.(information technology)
June 10, 2004... The first quarter reporting season revealed that the stabilisation in the business applications market that was showing up at the end of 2003 was no blip, although demand worldwide is still uneven. At first glance, results for the quarter...

The end of adolescence...
June 10, 2004... Some things in life - death, taxes, software bugs - are certain. But things in the IT industry suddenly seem a lot less certain than they have been. At one level, bitter enemies are acting like long-lost friends. As unusual spectacles go,...

Readers' letters.(Letter to the Editor)
June 10, 2004... With all due respect, it doesn't take an Einstein to see the validity of Nicholas Carr's argument [see report on the Harvard Business Review editor-at-large's keynote address to Information Age's Effective IT Summit 2004, where he reiterated...

Content congestion.
June 10, 2004... ScottishPower is, in some ways, the classic enterprise content management (ECM) software user: global, complex, with millions of customers and a seemingly never-ending set of rules and regulations with which to comply. In February, the...

Server's cutting edge.
June 10, 2004... In January 2001 Gary Stimac, the former head of Compaq Computer's systems division, unveiled a new venture where he had recently been appointed CEO. "The company vision is crystal clear," he said. "Our goal is to redefine server economics."...

RightNow employees strike it rich.
June 10, 2004... Ever since prospectors descended on the place in the 1860s, the area around Bozeman, a sleepy town surrounded by the Rocky Mountains, has been known as 'Gold Country'. Now, many of its 25,000 residents are set to join America's latest gold...

Avaya: big fish in a growing pond.
June 10, 2004... It has taken the best part of two decades, but the much vaunted convergence of voice and data networking appears finally to be underway. That is good news for Avaya, the enterprise networks company that was spun out of Lucent in 2000. Last...

The <em>Information Age</em> interview.(Interview)
June 10, 2004... Information Age (IA): Over the past two years you have brought together a sprawling IT structure spread across dozens of regional 'data centres' into a single, global organisation. What are some of the lessons learnt? Brian Jones (BJ): One...

Relative security.
June 10, 2004... For many years, conventional wisdom has dictated that the open source operating system Linux is inherently more secure than Microsoft's ubiquitous alternative, Windows. The primary reason, say Linux advocates, is the nature of the open...

Indian offshore IT suppliers.(information technology)
June 10, 2004... Increased maturity and diversification in the Indian IT services market will lead to an overall increase in software and services exports of around 30% in 2004, according to the latest research by analyst group Forrester. Forrester...

Outsourcing growth in Western Europe.
June 10, 2004... The outsourcing sector in Western Europe is growing at a "phenomenal" pace, according to Gartner, and will easily outperform the performance of the Western European IT services sector in coming years. Spend within the sector is expected to...

Teradata finds lifetougher at the top.
June 10, 2004... For more than a decade, Teradata, NCR's data warehousing division, has been sitting proudly at the pinnacle of the database market. It has not been quite alone at the summit: many of Oracle and IBM's biggest customers preferred to apply those...

Bell tolls in the bazaar.(benefits of open source software, an analysis)
June 10, 2004... Some years back, one of my colleagues wrote an article in which he committed a mild blasphemy against the Christian faith. That week, we got more letters for publication than for the rest of the entire year. So it is with a sense of...

Citrix fattens out thin client strategy.
June 10, 2004... Citrix is changing. The company, best known as a supplier of utilities to run Microsoft software on thin clients, wants to be known as a data access specialist. It is repositioning as a remote-access infrastructure software provider,...

Open all hours.(Linux is the solution to all problems )
June 10, 2004... For more than 100 years, it was generally accepted that anyone walking past the gilded statue of Athene on the way into the Athenaeum Club in London's Pall Mall was being received into the Establishment. It might be easier for the multitude to...

The human factor.(storage specialists are in short supply)
June 10, 2004... Storage has a people problem. According to Horison Information Strategies, annual storage growth rates are rising at over 50% to 70%, yet the capacity that any storage administrator can handle is only rising by 20% to 30%. At the same time,...

Major shift ahead for software licensing.
June 10, 2004... More than half of enterprise software vendors will be making changes to their licensing models in the next year, says IDC, driven by financial imperatives, industry dynamics and customer demands. The shift will better enable customers to...

NHS IT contract wins 'frighten' BT.(National Health Service, information technology, British Telecom)
June 10, 2004... As executive gaffes go, it may not have been in the Gerald Ratner league. But BT chairman Christopher Bland's telling reaction to a series of IT services contracts with the National Health Service was still faintly embarrassing for his company....

Open source viability.
June 10, 2004... Scott Lundstrom, senior vice president of analyst firm AMR Research, advises on the viability of using open source database technologies. A: Open source databases (OSDBs) are about to take off in the same way that Linux did just a few...