Information Age (London, UK) articles from June 2005

Information Age (London, UK) archives from June 2005

The integration initiative.(Mergers and Acquisitions)
June 10, 2005... In March 2005, IBM announced its acquisition of data integration vendor Ascential. Four years previously, it had bought Ascential's parent Informix for its database portfolio but left the data integration element behind. What happened in those...

Fashion statement.(Thomas Pink uses PowerPlay OLAP tool from Cognos for data management)
June 10, 2005... In retail, the number one priority is to keep the sales registers ringing, and in the fickle fashion world this can be a tall order. With a heritage dating back to the eighteenth century, shirt maker Thomas Pink has plenty of experience...

Inside the tornado.(business intelligence)
June 10, 2005... Its slow build up defies economic models for technology adoption. But, suddenly - after 20 years on the upwards slope - business intelligence (BI) is 'in the tornado'. Organisations are signing deals for many thousands of user seats and...

Managing performance.
June 10, 2005... Innovative applications of search and information retrieval technologies are now allowing business users to garner more meaningful knowledge from the growing mass of unstructured information available to them. Increasingly, these business...

Extra-terrestrial intelligence.
June 10, 2005... The costs of underwriting a space programme are huge, but US space agency NASA still has to account for every cent. As part of an overall rationalisation programme in the late 1990s NASA restructured its Shuttle Processing Directorate, which...

The real-time warehouse.
June 10, 2005... The cascade of data flooding into the enterprise is potentially capable of crippling business intelligence (BI) applications, such is the bewildering number of sources of information. And while data warehouses have traditionally been seen as...

The insight providers.(business intelligence software)
June 10, 2005... Actuate A leader in enterprise reporting, with a product designed to scale to handle the delivery of reports to tens or even hundreds of thousands of users. Key products: Actuate 8 Applix As a specialist in financial analytics, Applix...

Market data.(business intelligence software)
June 10, 2005... The business intelligence (BI) market in 2005 is as robust and healthy as it has ever been, with the sector's growth easily outstripping the average across the software industry. Analyst house Forrester Research expects the sector to show...

Thought processes.
June 10, 2005... The promise of business intelligence is a simple, but far-reaching one: the tools offer the insight into corporate and customer activity - both present and forecast - that is required for fast and effective decision-making. At all levels that...

Application intelligence.
June 10, 2005... The promise of 'a single version of the truth' has been one of the driving forces behind the growth of business intelligence (BI) since its inception. But increasingly, the competitive landscape of the BI market is forcing users to consider who...

Smart spending.
June 10, 2005... The logic is simple: business intelligence software is employed to make companies perform better. Therefore, the vendors say that the products - if used well - naturally pay for themselves. However, backing up these claims and getting...

A question of quality.(information technology services industry)
June 10, 2005... The value of business intelligence (BI) is undermined entirely if the data being analysed is inaccurate, incomplete or inconsistent. And data quality is more complex than simply checking that names and addresses are recorded properly: poor...

Performance optimisation.
June 10, 2005... Views on performance management software are currently at both extremes. Some hail the use of business intelligence (BI) tools and financial applications to gauge and react to the business's performance as the beginning of a new era of...

PeopleSoft reborn?(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... It would be a reasonable assumption that having acquired a website called 'davesnextmove.com', and having gone as far as populating the site with content, finding out what PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield is up to next should be easy. It...

DDoS SoS...(Distributed Denial of service attack)
June 10, 2005... Tales of Eastern European cyber-criminals amassing an army of 'zombie' computers, all bent on overwhelming some innocent online business's IT systems with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) are now part of IT lore. The...

Content filtering/email security.
June 10, 2005... Spyware, phishing attacks, adware and, in particular, spam continue to drive fast take-up of content filtering software and services. At the same time, the need to protect sensitive corporate information from the prying eyes of employees or...

IT skills shortage.(information technology)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... Three-quarters of IT contractors expect their salaries to increase this year, signalling that demand is at its highest since the dot-com boom, according to research from contractor services provider Giant Group. Historically, the largest...

Financial results.
June 10, 2005... For years, Siebel, the customer relationship management (CRM) software supplier, was a high-profile Wall Street favourite. It turned in quarter after quarter of strong growth, and founder Tom Siebel's rapacious appetite for the fight, not least...

Mergers &acquisitions.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... The latest to leave Nasdaq for the arms of private investors was online advertising technology provider DoubleClick, which was added to the portfolio of Hellman &Friedman for $1.1 billion. The move illustrates how technology investors are...

BA's analytical take off.(British Airways)
June 10, 2005... Online retail has transformed the travel industry. Five years ago, high street travel agents still handled the bulk of flights and accommodation bookings. Today a huge proportion of those transactions are carried out directly by the buyer over...

Distilling customer data.(banking industry)
June 10, 2005... The value of tracking customer behaviour is obvious to most businesses. It helps them improve customer interactions and identify possibilities for increasing sales. With this in mind, many vendors, and particularly those from the customer...

The democratisation of BI.(Business Intelligence Services Ltd.)
June 10, 2005... Locked within the vast, disparate banks of data that have been accumulated by organisations lies information that could empower every employee - from the chief executive to the sales assistant. But all too often companies lack the means to...

Business intelligence comes of age.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... Business intelligence is a sector that has grown up without really maturing. Until recently, different sets of users were expected to tackle distinct analytical tasks with standalone tools and applications from a multitude of vendors - vendors...

Infoconomy Index: Europe outpaces global IT economy.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... The Infoconomy Index has reached a historic milestone: European growth is exceeding that of the US-dominated Global Index for the first time in the five years since monitoring started. In May, European-headquartered companies grew 9.8% compared...

Application integration and middleware.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... Sales of application integration, middleware and portal software rose to $6.7 billion in 2004, up 5.8% on the previous year. According to analysts at market watcher Gartner application integration and middleware (AIM) products are playing...

Storage management software.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... Fuelled by strong sales of storage resource management products, the worldwide storage management software market is poised for another year of double-digit growth in 2005, according to industry analyst firm Gartner. Ever since a dip in...

Software as a service.(Spending on software as a service rose 39% in 2004.)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... Spending on software as a service (SaaS), the model in which applications are rented rather than purchased and delivered as a service over the Internet or a private network, rose 39% in 2004 to hit $4.2 billion worldwide, according to IDC. ...

Stats entertainment: instant messaging.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... As soon as a new communications tool becomes popular, there is always a host of naysayers on hand, warning of the dire consequences of allowing unfettered use. So it is for instant messaging (IM). Analyst house Gartner currently estimates that...

There is no headline RIM aims for wider role for BlackBerry.(Research in Motion Ltd.)
June 10, 2005... It has become the corporate equivalent of the iPod: the BlackBerry mobile email device, from Canada's Research in Motion (RIM), has become the ubiquitous business tool. And that certainly shows in RIM's numbers. In May 2005 the company...

IT in the fast lane.(sports sponsorship)
June 10, 2005... Why do so many IT companies sponsor or subsidise Formula One racing teams? Part of the answer, of course, lies in the glamour, in the association with winning, and, of course, the free tickets. But there is another reason: the IT budgets of...

Month in Review.
June 10, 2005... IBM announced it would lay off between 10,000 and 13,000 workers over the next three months, with the majority of the cuts coming from Europe. After unexpectedly modest financial results last quarter, which IBM blamed on weakness in its...

CIOs to turn night watchmen.(Chief information officers)
June 10, 2005... The responsibility for maintaining security is nothing new for most company CIOs, but to date that has traditionally been limited to securing the network. Increasingly, however, physical security is being added to their remit. However,...

Extreme IT: Battery assault.(Nanotech 2005.; Lucent Technologies Inc. Bell Laboratories demonstrates Nanostructured Novel Battery.)(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... It seems that no matter what the latest 'must have' portable gadget of the day is - mobile phone, PDA or emailer - one thing remains constant: rubbish battery life. While hardware innovations are constantly producing more powerful machines,...

"Software licence mismanagement is a crime.".
June 10, 2005... Action... The Business Software Alliance (BSA) released its annual report on software piracy in May 2005. The study, conducted by analysts IDC, claimed that 27% of business software in the UK is pirated. While this is a small reduction on...

Somerfield's email megastore.(Somerfield PLC receives award for using Veritas product, saving more than [pounds sterling]3 million to date.)
June 10, 2005... Every now and again, a software company finds a customer who is so passionate about the power of one of its products that he - or she - becomes one of its one most vocal marketing agents. Colin Clark, corporate cost audit manager for...

Alstom creates a virtual world.
June 10, 2005... Ask any data centre manager to list his or her biggest challenges at present, and, in most cases, a cluster of related concerns will top the list: provisioning and managing a large number of new servers; managing heat and power; and dealing...

Inside stories.(The Art of Intrusion)(Book Review)
June 10, 2005... Kevin Mitnick, once the world's most notorious hacker - and someone who made it onto the FBI's most wanted list - has been one of the 'good guys' of IT security since his release from prison in 2000. In the intervening years he has traded...

Morgan Stanley's email bounceback.
June 10, 2005... It has been a chilling lesson for anyone responsible for email archiving policy and practice. On 17 May, a Florida jury was told by the presiding judge that investment bank Morgan Stanley had to pay the full $604.3 million claim made...

Data centres reach for 'Factor 15'.
June 10, 2005... As the Met Office issues warnings that the UK is in for a hotter than usual summer, with temperatures predicted to hit above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, UK data centres are bracing themselves for some major heat-induced problems. Server...

Check Point's balanced risk.(Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Ramat Gan, Israel))
June 10, 2005... Amid the changing landscape of the security sector, Check Point Software has been seeking a broader identity to affirm its status as a security technology heavyweight. While the undisputed pioneer of firewall software, Check Point has, over the...

Revival or survival: i2 at a watershed.(i2 Ltd.)
June 10, 2005... After i2's annual user conference in 2004, commentators highlighted several factors that gave them some optimism about the future of the supply chain management (SCM) software company. Despite its precipitous fall from grace following the...

NetSuite sets the scene for hosted applications warfare.(Netsuite Development Corp.)
June 10, 2005... The two champions of the hosted application model for software delivery are locked in an ever-fiercer competitive struggle to build critical mass and customer credibility in this embryonic market. In May 2005, NetSuite, which offers a broad...

Faux growth.(information technology sector forecasts)
June 10, 2005... Ever since it crashed into recession in 2002, the IT sector has watched indicators of its performance like a hawk. As it fought its way back into positive growth in 2004, analysts poured over the numbers, fearful that the recovery was...

Aligned delivery.(concept of IT governance proving useful to organisations)
June 10, 2005... Is the concept of IT governance proving useful to organisations as they strive to consistently deliver business value? When business technology optimisation vendor Mercury Interactive conducted a worldwide survey of more than 800 IT...

Knowledge transfer.(debate on e-learning)
June 10, 2005... E-learning has come a long way since the days of CD-based tutorials. Vast quantities of educational courseware are now available over the web or the corporate intranet, with collaborative technologies facilitating live, online classrooms led by...

Feedback.(Letter to the Editor)
June 10, 2005... Mass delusion It was interesting to read in the 'Effective IT Summit' supplement to April's Information Age the view put forward that IT is bringing itself successfully into line with the business agenda. If the industry as a whole holds...

Asset protection.(British Telecommunications PLC picked eight big telecommunications equipment providers to supply equipment.)
June 10, 2005... A couple of weeks before the UK general election in early May, I found myself seated for lunch with a French, an Italian and an American analyst at an international IT conference. With our hosts preferring to stick to bits and bytes, our...

Locked out.(distributed denial of service attacks as a tool for extortion.)
June 10, 2005... Most criminal behaviour - whether traditional or online - follows an all-too-predictable pattern: vulnerabilities are identified in the way valuable assets are protected and then those are exploited until the victims invest in protection. When...

Transparent dealings.
June 10, 2005... "There are two major reasons for adopting cutting-edge technology," says Anand Moodliar, general manager of the national operations centre for Spoornet, the rail unit of South African logistics company Transnet. "You want to be the best of the...

Court is in session.(using of electronic records as civil evidence.)
June 10, 2005... For most companies, it is among the worst things that could happen: a lawyer's letter lands on the managing director's desk informing them that a disgruntled customer, a former employee with a grudge or a regulatory authority seeking to enforce...

Architect of SAP's future.
June 10, 2005... When SAP wants a senior executive to address the faithful about its technology directions - a role historically performed by its previous CEO and co-founder Hasso Plattner - it does not look to CEO Henning Kagermann. Instead, it turns to its...

Green economics?
June 10, 2005... Green IT policies for the sake of environmentalism are not high on the CIO's priority list. But there is a growing body of support for introducing these policies as an effective way to cut operating costs. Environmentally conscious working...

Waste not, want not.
June 10, 2005... Efficiency rather than expenditure is at the forefront of most IT purchasers' minds. Battle-scarred by years of tight or cut budgets, they are being forced to squeeze the maximum value from their existing systems, software and services and...

Veritas and Symantec affirm marriage vows.(VERITAS Software Corp.)
June 10, 2005... At the end of his keynote speech at the Veritas Vision users' conference in April 2005, John Thompson, the CEO of security software supplier Symantec was congratulated by a customer on his company's acquisition of Veritas, the world's leading...

Risk and reward...(Editorial)
June 10, 2005... It is time to face up to the facts. IT may be a huge aid to business productivity and efficiency, it can provide differentiation and competitive edge, it can be the basis for new markets and new business models. Technology people love that...

When IT all goes wrong.(information technology management can have high impact on the business.)
June 10, 2005... Put a group of IT executives on a conference panel and ask them the killer question: What is your worst IT nightmare? Most dare not highlight their real fears, but the answers that do come back reflect a certain kind of thinking: the main...

Data quality.
June 10, 2005... Corporate systems are awash with inaccurate, incomplete, out-of-date, redundant, meaningless and duplicated data. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that companies consistently make poor and ill-guided decisions. Or, as the mantra of the data...

The security conundrum.
June 10, 2005... Corporate information security is a mess of contradictions. Good intentions of dealing with threats in a proactive and holistic way are undermined by day-to-day fire-fighting. And as the threats grow, they increasingly intrude on the ability to...

Software pirates.(SeaCode starts software development laboratory in a cruise ship.)
June 10, 2005... Three US entrepreneurs are hoping to bring new meaning to the term 'offshoring'. The trio have purchased a disused cruise ship, which they intend to kit out as a cutting edge software development laboratory, and they are manning the vessel with...

High-performance technical servers.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... The worldwide market for high-performance technical servers, machines used for calculation-intensive scientific research, is recovering from the slump that ran from 2001 to 2003, according to analysts at IT market research company IDC. ...

Carr revisited.(Nicholas Carr says "IT doesn't matter")
June 10, 2005... It was almost exactly two years ago - in June of 2003 - that mild-mannered academic Nicholas Carr wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled 'IT Doesn't Matter'. The article, considered and understated, was interpreted as a savage...

Data disasters.
June 10, 2005... Human error can have dramatic consequences as the Bank of America has found to its cost. In February 2005, Bank of America admitted it had lost a "small" number of back-up tapes containing over a million financial records of credit cards held...

Soft costs.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... Ask, well, almost anyone, and they will tell you that software charging mechanisms are badly in need of a thorough overhaul. As Jonathan Schwartz, the chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems pointed out recently, there are at least ten...

The uber user group.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... The Concise Oxford Dictionary does not define the collective noun for a group of technologists. Some commentators have suggested that 'asylum' could be the correct word. An asylum of technologists has a certain ring to it. But whatever the...

Extreme IT: Migration.(Brief Article)
June 10, 2005... As Alpine migrations go, Swiss bank UBS's recent upgrade of its IT system may not enjoy the notoriety of Hannibal's elephant excursion, but it was nonetheless impressive. The year-long 'Abacus' programme saw the migration of: 2,000 online and...

TD Waterhouse: Knowing you.(TD Waterhouse UK)
June 10, 2005... In 2003, Online broker TD Waterhouse UK, which enables its 350,000 UK investors to buy and sell shares online or over the phone, reviewed its accounts opening process - everything from its paper application forms to its authentication mechanism...

OECD: Diplomatic immunity.(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)
June 10, 2005... The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) compiles social and economic data and delivers it on a confidential basis to government agencies across the globe. Historically, it has distributed its research to the 13,000...

Covisint: New identity.
June 10, 2005... While security is critical to any organisation, there are few businesses that can say it produced not just competitive advantage but a whole new line of business. Trading portal Covisint is one such company. Covisint was developed in 2001...

ScottishPower: Secure service.(Scottish Power PLC)
June 10, 2005... Although there have yet to be any known instances of 'cyberterrorism' - politically motivated attacks on elements of the critical national infrastructure - ScottishPower would make a plausible target. It has 3.7 million customers and coverage...

Security: Risk and reward.
June 10, 2005... The adage 'no news is good news' certainly holds true for corporate IT security. But when success is measured by an absence of security incidents, it is often tempting for business executives to view the growing expenditure on security as...

Strong authentication can be effective.
June 10, 2005... Forrester believes that Schneier's argument is misleading in two ways: He gives more credit to the attackers and their techniques than is currently due, while downplaying the effectiveness of solutions. And he addresses transaction fraud but...

The failure of two-factor authentication.
June 10, 2005... Two-factor authentication isn't our saviour. It won't defend against phishing. It's not going to prevent identity theft. It's not going to secure online accounts from fraudulent transactions. It solves the security problems we had 10 years ago,...

Security: Good intentions.(Jericho Forum UK's most prominent security user groups.)
June 10, 2005... Is security getting in the way of doing business? That is the premise behind the formation of one of the UK's most prominent security user groups, the Jericho Forum. Led by information security chiefs from companies such as the Royal Mail, ICI...

The rise of spyware.
June 10, 2005... Spyware is a term which, almost literally, encompasses a multitude of sins. Normally it is taken to refer to standalone programs that monitor the user's computer practices without their knowledge. However it can be bundled in with applications,...

Security dictionary.
June 10, 2005... [degrees] Brute force - Automated method of cracking a password by trying every possible combination until the correct one is discovered. [degrees] Buffer overflow - Classic attack requiring intimate knowledge of the targeted application,...

Supplier snapshots.
June 10, 2005... The acquisition of TippingPoint in January 2005 takes 3Com back into contention with networking leaders Cisco and Juniper by adding intrusion prevention to its switches. Also active in the VoIP Security Alliance, set to be a growth area for...

Market data.
June 10, 2005... Despite the current media panic surrounding identity theft (and a corresponding growth in shredder sales), only 10% of IT managers consider it a serious security threat, according to a recent survey conducted by the Department of Trade and...

Making compliance pay.
June 10, 2005... Compliance costs, and every organisation knows it. A 2005 survey by Computer Associates' identity management software division, Netegrity, found that over 20% of US companies required to meet the stipulations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)...

The enemy within.
June 10, 2005... The Internet is a dangerous place. Hidden in the IP 'cloud' surrounding modern IT infrastructures is a legion of spammers, hackers, crackers, cyber-terrorists, phishers, pharmers and assorted other criminals. Their mission: to crack corporate...

Information protection.
June 10, 2005... Building scenarios of a security breach, IT executives often picture hackers as 'script kiddies' or con artists trying to crack through the defences they have put in place. But the reality is that around 70% of all security breaches come from...

Wireless lockdown.(mobile devices saftey and security.)
June 10, 2005... Hotel heiress Paris Hilton is used to having her private details broadcast across the Internet. But she was less than pleased in February 2005 when her privacy was breached by someone getting into her T-Mobile Sidekick II mobile phone and an...

The audit trial.( information technology security breach can wreak on a company.)
June 10, 2005... There are few, if any, business leaders today that are not aware of the potentially devastating impact that an IT security breach can wreak on a company. The potential for financial loss, damage to brand value and the consequences of...

Securing VoIP.(Voice over Internet Protocol)
June 10, 2005... Early in 2005 the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published a 99-page report entitled: "Security Considerations for Voice-over-IP Systems." It is not recommended reading for the feint-hearted. In a nutshell, the...

Password evolution.
June 10, 2005... Passwords, in conjunction with user names, remain the most common means of authenticating user access. But, as has been proven time and time again, they are inherently insecure. Too often they are easy to guess or are left unchanged from...