Information Age (London, UK) articles from May 2002

Information Age (London, UK) archives from May 2002

Back to the drawing board...(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... In the late 1990s, when the rush to 'e-enable' the business was not constrained by trivial matters like budget, chief executives, marketing directors and even (some) finance heads were badgering IT managers about driving their businesses into...

CRM redrawn.
May 10, 2002... Travel agent Thomas Cook has achieved what marketing gurus might trumpet as multi-channel customer relationship nirvana. In the UK, it offers services or takes bookings through more than eight channels: face-to-face, phone and fax interaction...

Remote control.('Remote applications management)
May 10, 2002... The application service provider (ASP) model has been badly tarnished. The proposition - enthusiastically embraced by the software industry - that organisations hand over their business applications to a third-party hosting service was treated...

Database dogfight.
May 10, 2002... It is a problem that relational database software vendors have been wrestling with since the dawn of B2B commerce: how to provide facilities for managing and querying XML data, without sacrificing performance and without compromising the...

Pain points.(delivery of computing as a utility)
May 10, 2002... For organisations of all sizes the pain has become intolerable. As IT struggles to meet users' ever-greater demands and to show it is adding substantially to business goals, the spotlight has fallen on some uncomfortable perceptions: that IT...

Legal binds.
May 10, 2002... Executives at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly know the importance of protecting customer data - but only because in June 2001, the company inadvertently revealed the email addresses of almost 700 customers who were taking the anti-depressant...

Consolidating for competitive advantage.
May 10, 2002... For much of 2001, Oracle, the software giant, ran a global advertising campaign that boasted how, through the use of ebusiness software, it had saved itself $1 billion annually. That is a huge sum and it was a huge claim - so big, in fact, that...

Seeking out savings.(server consolidation)
May 10, 2002... Reducing cost is a major driver behind server consolidation projects, so the chance are most organisations will be asking the same three questions: How much of a saving will consolidation provide? How much will the project cost to...

Remodelling the enterprise.
May 10, 2002... The basis for a consolidated IT infrastructure will be fundamentally the same whatever the specific needs of a company. Stuart Murray, solutions architect at IT infrastructure services provider Computacenter, says, "An ideal consolidated...

Projected pain.
May 10, 2002... A survey by Gartner Dataquest last year found that 45% of UK organisations had no plans to consolidate their systems. Why is the number so low, given that the savings consolidation can offer are so high? Simon Walsh at Computacenter, the...

Viewlocity backs out of EAI.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Supply chain software vendor Viewlocity has sold its enterprise application integration (EAI) business to French consulting and systems integration company Sopra for an undisclosed sum. Viewlocity will now focus on its supply chain event...

Ominous Oracle.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Database and applications giant Oracle endured a further fall in both revenue and net income in its latest quarter. Revenues for the third quarter of 2002 fell 17% to $2.2 billion, compared with $2.7 billion for the same period in 2001. Net...

Risk and reward?(network security)
May 10, 2002... Security is more like buying insurance than buying an application," says Brendan Major, director of information services at child protection charity, the NSPCC [National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children]. "How do you quantify...

Palm on the up.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... After a year of losses and fluctuating revenue, handheld computer maker Palm has surprised its critics with a return to profitability. In its third quarter of 2002, which ended on 1 March, the company recorded a slim profit of $2.9 million,...

Windows of opportunity.(network vulnerability assessment)
May 10, 2002... When SGI employee Dan Farmer developed the world's first vulnerability assessment tool in 1995, he could hardly have anticipated the extreme reaction it would provoke. Only someone with malicious, criminal intent could possibly have use for a...

Dealing with insecurity.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... In the age of collaborative commerce, where businesses increasingly open up areas of their internal systems to partners, it is easy to forget that even the closest business allies can represent a threat. "A chip manufacturer we are working with...

Flood of business intelligence software takeovers.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
May 10, 2002... A fresh wave of consolidation is underway in the business intelligence software sector as large vendors plug gaps in their portfolios with acquisitions. The largest disclosed figure in March was Ascential Software's $92 million acquisition of...

European applications vendors remain buoyant.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Flying in the face of economic uncertainty, Europe's business applications vendors are sustaining strong financial performances - especially those able to leverage a solid domestic base. In their latest financial periods, Sweden's IFS and...

European IT services sector goes into decline.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... This is the season of European annual results, when companies typically try to mask or enhance the picture of their most recent financial performance by choosing to publish only numbers for the full year. When pulled out from the annual...

Application protection.
May 10, 2002... It is a damning indictment of web site security. Since the start of 2000, application-level software vendor Sanctum has used its own scanning software to assess the vulnerability of over 300 web sites. And in 97% of these audits, Sanctum was...

Wide open wireless?(drive-by hacking)
May 10, 2002... Drive-by hacking, or 'war-driving', is a relatively new variation on an old theme: hackers randomly searching for networks to break into. The difference is that instead of dialling random phone numbers or scanning random Internet addresses, the...

Bolstering B2B.(electronic commerce and network safety)
May 10, 2002... Every day, the average company's network will experience 30 attempted security breaches via the Internet, including anything from simple email viruses to full-fledged hacking bids. Six to 10 of them will pose serious threats to a company's...

SAP takes another stab at the applications mid-market.(purchase of TopManage Financial Systems)
May 10, 2002... Enterprise software giant SAP has never had much success in selling its flagship software, R/3 and more recently mySAP.com, to small- and medium-sized enterprises. Not so surprising, given its typical customer has at least 10,000 users. So...

Benchmarking relevance?(database software)
May 10, 2002... Like many of the world's largest software vendors, database software giant Oracle uses product benchmarking results as the cornerstone of multi-million dollar marketing campaigns. One of Oracle's recent advertisements compared the performance...

Fujitsu sets out strategy for global IT services.
May 10, 2002... Japanese systems vendor Fujitsu has historically modelled itself on IBM. Yet when IBM started to focus on the fast-growing, consistently profitable areas of software and services at the beginning of the 1990s, Fujitsu decided to remain...

Oracle faces revolt against its licensing practices.
May 10, 2002... Ever since the mid-2000 departure of chief operating officer Ray Lane - after a progressive marginalisation of his role in the company by its flamboyant founder and CEO Larry Ellison - database software giant Oracle seems to have become more...

E-marketplace watch.(electronic commerce-marketplaces increasingly outsourcing applications)
May 10, 2002... Outsourcing Industry consortium-backed e-marketplaces are increasingly outsourcing application functionality. Automotive e-marketplace, Covisint, is embracing outsourced software and services in order to provide its manufacturing members...

Opening up the office.(Microsoft's Windows XP operating system)
May 10, 2002... Will organisations see desktop technology costs skyrocket if they migrate to Microsoft's Windows XP operating system? That debate has been raging since the software giant announced the introduction of a new pricing scheme - Software Assurance -...

The <em>Information Age</em> Interview.(Egg Chief Information Officer Dana Cuffe)
May 10, 2002... Information Age (IA): Can you give us an overview of how Egg has developed as an online operation since its launch in October 1998? Dana Cuffe (DC): It's been an exciting three and a half years at Egg. We've had three major events - one was...

To Rainfinity and beyond.(Rainfinity's Reliable Array of Independent Nodes)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Space travel is always dangerous, but the last thing one of Nasa's shuttles needs is a computer failure. Rainfinity's RAIN (Reliable Array of Independent Nodes) is an offshoot of the technology used by the US aeronautics agency to make sure...

Xchanging grabs the limelight in BPO market.(to float shares on the London Stock Exchange)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... In the last 15 months, not a single IT company has floated on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). But Xchanging thinks it may be the company to break that duck. "Investors and merchant banks are saying to us that we're ready now," says founder and...

Sychron's search for commercial direction.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Company: Sychron Main activity: Data centre resource management software Founded: 1998 CEO: Ed Turner HQ: Palo Alto, CA, and Oxford, UK Status: Privately funded through angel investors. VC round due. Revenues: Not...

DataCore takes a virtual storage view.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Company: DataCore Software Main activity: Network storage virtualisation software Founded: 1998 CEO: George Teixeira HQ: Fort Lauderdale, Florida Status: Privately held. DataCore has raised a total of $75 million in three...

Peregrine scraps its muddled B2B strategy.(Peregrine Systems, business-to-business integration tools)
May 10, 2002... Steve Gardner, CEO of infrastructure management company Peregrine Systems, says he doesn't believe there's any great benefit in surprising customers. Which is why, when the company's management decided to sell off a large chunk of acquired...

European e-markets - outlook dismal.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... The outlook for European e-marketplaces is gloomy. According to a recent survey conducted by market research company Forrester Research, 88% of European e-marketplaces are not yet profitable. Nor are they likely to achieve profitability unless...

Security survey: Your responses.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
May 10, 2002... IT security continues to be high on the corporate agenda, according to a recent online survey conducted by Infoconomy, the publishers of Information Age, in conjunction with managed services provider Vistorm. Two-thirds of respondents...

Storage revolution in waiting.
May 10, 2002... Building a corporate-wide storage area network (SAN) is no minor undertaking. Take the IT operations of Swedish automotive manufacturer Volvo. At its Gothenburg site, the organisation has built "one of the largest SANs in operation" that...

Still a 'head in the sand' approach to IT security among UK businesses, says survey.(Deticas survey)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... "Until organisations wake up to the fact that effective security is all about policy and process as well as technology, we will continue to see security breaches in the press, week after week." That is the gloomy prediction of Martin...

Internet vigilantes put a stop to spam.(Australia's Net Police)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... A group of technologists calling themselves the 'Net Police' have helped rescue the reputation of an Australian Internet service provider (ISP) unfairly accused of hosting 'spam' emails. Unbeknown to ISP Labyrinth Connections, an unrelated...

Webex demonstrates robust collaboration - Hello? Hello?!(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... It's hard to know which technologies are reliable, and which are not. During a conference call with Information Age, KV Rao, director of technology for online meeting and collaboration platform WebEx, explained why voice, not video, was still...

Operation recycle.
May 10, 2002... It is time to take a new look at so-called 'legacy' applications, says Barry Morris, chairman of integration tools company Iona Technologies. Far from being outdated programs that slow down the forward-looking, agile enterprise, they are in...

Off with the new, on with the old, says Forrester.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... As CEO of market research company Forrester Research, George Colony makes his living from predicting the future of the technology market. At times, these predictions have been a little too enthusiastic. In 1999, Forrester analysts predicted...

Simplicity is priceless.(Web site design)
May 10, 2002... Lots of web sites are "miserable". They do not justify the time and money that has been invested in them. That is the opinion of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen. As co-founder of consultancy the Nielsen Norman Group, Nielsen has tested...

Dwindling server revenues.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Server revenues in Western Europe fell by 15% in the fourth quarter 2001, contributing to an overall decline of 9% for the year. This is despite a rise in the number of server shipments in the region, which grew 6% in 2001, according to figures...

Customer service is key decider for web hosting.(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Customer service is the most important consideration for organisations when choosing a managed hosting provider, says a recent report from market research company Vanson Bourne. Although cost (50%) and flexibility (45%) are important criteria...

Recovery ahead for IT spending.(IDC forecast)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
May 10, 2002... Researcher IDC predicts a recovery in IT spending for organisations in Western Europe. It forecasts a growth rate for 2002 of 6.6% - a revision of its previous estimate of 6.4%. This compares to a growth rate of 5% in 2001. By 2003, the...

Portal challenges.(Plumtree survey)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Organisations are forging ahead with enterprise portal deployments - but these projects are not without their challenges. Portal vendor Plumtree conducted a survey of 110 of its customers, and found that, despite the downturn in spending on IT...

Apache widens lead in web server software.(Netcraft Web Server Survey)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Apache, the open source web server software, continues to widen its lead over competitors, according to the Netcraft Web Server Survey, an analysis of web server software usage on Internet-connected computers. NetCraft collects and collates as...

Integration is the key to collaboration.(Andersen survey)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... Organisations will not benefit from collaborative commerce until they resolve internal integration issues. But while 70% of the UK respondents to a survey conducted by management consultancy Andersen agreed that seamless integration is...

Cut through the hype...(Brief Article)
May 10, 2002... BEA Systems is an enthusiastic advocate of web services. Along with other industry heavyweights, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard and SAP, the application server specialist believes that web services - application components that share data over...

Readers' letters.(Letter to the Editor)
May 10, 2002... Size doesn't matter According to your article Cutting edge?, blade servers claim to squeeze as much computing power into as little space as possible. Once again, hardware vendors have hit users with what they like to think is a new...