Information Age (London, UK) articles from May 2003

Information Age (London, UK) archives from May 2003

Leading Geeks.(Book Review)
May 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...

Application servers.
May 10, 2003... The application server (AS) is one of the most important, but most difficult to define, technologies in modern business software. This is partly because of technical complexity and confusing marketing; but equally, it is because the AS has been...

News review.(Information technology industry news briefs)
May 10, 2003... Software giant Microsoft finally released its server operating system, Windows Server 2003, after delaying the launch three times. The goal of the new release is to re-position the company as a high-end 'software stack' supplier, competing...

BMC shops its way into service management.(Company Profile)
May 10, 2003... One message has resonated throughout the technology industry during the past 18 months of economic decline and budget cuts: IT simply has to work more closely with business. Scores of software suppliers have latched on to this trend. Not...

Political agenda.(Siebel Systems head Tom Siebel is politically active)
May 10, 2003... Tom Siebel has never been shy of cultivating public prominence. With the air of a career politician, he forged the identity of his Silicon Valley-headquartered customer relationship management (CRM) company Siebel Systems around his own image,...

Soap opera at Soap maker.(Procter & Gamble lets an outsourcing contract to Hewlett-Packard)
May 10, 2003... IT outsourcing deals are rarely as fascinating as they are big. But the decision by Procter & Gamble, the US consumer goods supplier, to award a $3 billion outsourcing contract to IT giant Hewlett-Packard completes a story that has taken as...

Arrested recovery.(The IT industry's recovery has been slow)(Brief Article)
May 10, 2003... The IT industry's painfully slow recovery stalled in April, with vendors blaming a host of macro-economic factors, from the war in Iraq to the impact of the SARS virus. The Infoconomy Global Index, which tracks the combined revenue growth...

Planning for success.(Book Review)
May 10, 2003... "How can we improve our business performance in the face of stagnant or falling demand?" It's a question that has been asked countless times in recent months by managers of companies, large and small, in sectors as diverse as manufacturing,...

Business process management.
May 10, 2003... Organisations are moving from a data-driven view of business and of IT systems, which tend to be hard-wired and inflexible, to a process-driven approach, which is much more fluid, functional and is designed to cross boundaries. That, at...

Noetix's maps route to faster reporting.(Company Profile)
May 10, 2003... According to Noetix CEO Paul Song, most organisations focus so heavily on running their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that they ignore the value of the data stored within them - at least until it is needed for management reporting....

ArcSight assesses the 'true scope' of security threats.(Company Profile)
May 10, 2003... Aside from blocking hackers, the biggest headache in corporate computer security, according to computer security managers, is dealing with the overwhelming flood of data from the very devices that are supposed to help protect a company's...

How much does ROI really matter?(return on investment)(Cover Story)
May 10, 2003... Our cover story this month is dedicated to a subject that has become ubiquitous in the IT management field over the past two to three years - return-on-investment, or ROI. No one can ever accuse the IT industry of half-hearted marketing....

The virtual classroom.
May 10, 2003... It is widely recognised that when companies have to cut costs, training is almost always one of the first things to be affected. And that was certainly the case at British Airways. When the airline embarked on a round of cost-cutting measures...

Web services scramble.
May 10, 2003... The software industry has always been prone to getting excited about its own technologies. But with web services, it is excited as never before. Barry Morris, CEO of integration middleware company Iona, is an example. He believes that a...

Perception and deception.(The return on investment situation is discussed)
May 10, 2003... Bill Wohl is angry. As vice president of public relations at enterprise applications company SAP, he spends most of his time - and millions of dollars of SAP's money - crafting and refining the company's image as a supplier of software products...

Avoiding the TUPE trap.(Transfer of Undertaking (Protection of Employment) regulations)
May 10, 2003... I know my local greengrocer well. He is a colourful character, rotund, red-cheeked and not much hair on top. Some years ago he had taken over the bakery shop next door, but had to let the till operator go. I remember visiting his shop at...

The <em>Information Age</em> Interview.(Sainsbury business transformation director and CIO Margaret Miller is interviewed)(Interview)
May 10, 2003... Information Age (IA): Sainsbury's outsourcing deal with Accenture is arguably one of the most far-reaching in the UK. What challenges was Sainsbury's facing when it decided to embark on the deal? Margaret Miller (MM): The genesis was when...

Why small is big.(The small and medium-sized enterprise business software sector is going through rapid change)
May 10, 2003... The small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business software sector is going through a period of rapid change. Suppliers are converging on the market, which is expanding fast as new technologies are being developed and deployed. The reasons...