Information Age (London, UK) articles from November 2002

Information Age (London, UK) archives from November 2002

SAP taking cautious approach to 2003.
November 10, 2002... German enterprise applications giant SAP has a reputation for being more sober in style than some of its more flamboyant US-based competitors - but even by its own standards of reserve, SAP is facing the future with extreme caution. When...

Manugistics pins hopes on price is right strategy.
November 10, 2002... The process of identifying the right price to charge an individual customer for a specific product in a particular region, can take many organisations as long as five or six days. Bruce Richardson, director of research at analyst company...

PeopleSoft's European challenge.
November 10, 2002... "PeopleSoft does not have a product problem in Europe," insists Craig Conway, chief executive of the Pleasanton, California-based enterprise applications software vendor. What the company's European operations do face, he acknowledges, is an...

Is CMG the right buy for Logica's 'get big' strategy?
November 10, 2002... When London-based services vendor Logica announced the acquisition of rival CMG at the beginning of November 2002, it was hardly an unexpected move. The deal had been trailed a month earlier in the business sections of many of the Sunday...

Vignette buys portal vendor Epicentric - why?
November 10, 2002... When Vignette announced that it was paying $26 million in cash and $6 million in stock to acquire portal software vendor Epicentric, the deal raised a number of eyebrows, not to mention questions. What 'synergies' is Vignette CEO Thomas...

Growth assurance at Microsoft.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... Microsoft's new licensing scheme, Software Assurance, may have caused controversy among technology buyers, but has taken the software giant's finances into rude health. For the company's third quarter to September 30, 2002, its revenues...

Infoconomy index - towards zero.(200 largest technology companies register -6.4% growth for October, 2002)(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... The IT industry continues its slow crawl back to positive growth. The Infoconomy Index, which tracks collective revenue change at the world's 200 largest technology companies, edged up to -6.4% in October, from -7.7% in September. The...

Progress ties to catch the XML wave.(Progress Software acquires Excelon)
November 10, 2002... In the current business climate, it takes more than cutting edge technology to keep a software vendor alive. Over the past few years, Burlington, Massachusetts-based Excelon has transformed itself from a specialist in object database software...

B2B vendors' results nosedive.(quarterly results for business-to-business software vendors released)(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... The former high-flyers of the business-to-business (B2B) software industry collectively experienced one of their worst quarters yet in the three months leading to 30 September 30 2002. Without exception, revenues slid - and in some cases,...

Mixed financial fortunes in security market.(information security system providers reveal quarterly earnings figures)(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... Security systems may still be high on IT managers' lists of purchasing priorities, but this did not prevent a mixed bag of financial results from some of the leaders in the sector in their latest financial quarters. Among the strongest...

Low-end sales bolster EMC.(EMC derives sales boost from low end systems)(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... High-end storage systems that run into millions of dollars are not high on IT purchasing agendas at present. This factor has not helped EMC, the market leader in this sector. Indeed, one third of respondents to a recent CIO survey by investment...

Outside of the box.(Trends in software applications outsourcing discussed)(Industry Overview)
November 10, 2002... The downturn in the economy has forced many technology decision-makers to rethink how they spend their budgets. In some cases, technology areas that in the past have been dismissed as risky or difficult to manage are now being considered a...

Satisfaction guaranteed?(effectiveness of Siebel's customer relationship management software debated)(Company Profile)
November 10, 2002... Over the past few years, one software company has attracted more criticism for its products' failure to deliver to expectations than any other - customer relationship management giant Siebel. In October 2002, a US-based research company,...

MarketFirst goes for a song.(Pivotal acquires marketing automation software company for about $1 million)(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... The on-going consolidation in the customer relationship management (CRM) software sector gained pace in October. Vancouver-based Pivotal, which counts DIY company Wickes and property services company Savills among its customers, struck the...

Top Layer sharpens security infrastructure.(Top Layer Networks's intrusion detection systems promoted)(Company Profile)
November 10, 2002... Standard network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) often struggle to deal with heavy volumes of data. As the network gets busier, more and more packets get dropped and malicious activity is increasingly likely to pass unnoticed. But...

Tonic's tonic for monitoring web applications.(Tonic Software's network monitoring software works from the user side )(Company Profile)
November 10, 2002... Most systems management software operates deep down in the guts of a network, monitoring the performance of software and systems. But Austin, Texas-based Tonic Software says its software can help network administrators monitor the performance...

Brain drain.(companies need to take measures to prevent loss of intellectual assets as employees move on)(Industry Overview)
November 10, 2002... It is a simple fact of life: employees quit. So it stands to reason that, on any long-running IT project, members of the team will leave the organisation - and the project - for any one of a hundred reasons. But from time to time,...

Cisco needs a new networking pitch.(Cisco Systems needs to find a new selling point to generate growth)(Company Profile)
November 10, 2002... On the surface, it looks as if John Chambers, Cisco CEO, has much to smile about. While fellow giants of the technology industry continue to struggle, Cisco rang up a 12% increase in revenues in its fourth fiscal quarter of 2002, one of...

Business Process Management: The Third Wave.(Book Review)
November 10, 2002... IT directors and business executives, business school professors and software vendors, get ready. This book may be gently titled Business Process Management: The Third Wave, but the wave that its authors say is 'inevitable' is no ripple. It...

Patch panic.(vast number of operating systems, applications and web servers remain unpatched )
November 10, 2002... When software giant Oracle released its 11i Applications suite in Spring 2000, early adopters had little idea what was about to hit them. Quite simply, the software was so bug-ridden that, in the following months, Oracle had to rush out patch...

Strategic sourcing the Portum way.
November 10, 2002... Strategic sourcing, according to Gerald Heydenreich, chief executive of e-procurement specialist Portum, is not simply a matter of buying the right products from the right suppliers at the right time. It is also, he says, about building "a more...

The missing link.(emergence of web services)
November 10, 2002... For IT organisations of all sizes, the emerging technology of web services is already proving itself a flexible and inexpensive means of integrating and deploying applications. The initial adoption has been almost exclusively for in-house...

Expert advice.(adoption of business process outsourcing)
November 10, 2002... Question: ??????? Professor Wendy Currie from the Department of IS and Computing at Brunel University tackles the question: Business process outsourcing (BPO) promises organisations a new generation of outsourcing services that will...

The <em>Information Age</em> interview.(Ian Taylor)(Interview)
November 10, 2002... Information Age (IA): When two companies merge, the implications of the deal for IT systems are frequently overlooked. How high up the list of priorities was IT in the pre-merger discussions at HBOS, and what challenges did post-merger...

HyperRoll turbo-charges databases.
November 10, 2002... When Yossi Caspi was head of data warehousing operations in Israel at drinks maker Coca Cola, he had the kind of problem that is all too familiar to business intelligence (BI) professionals. Simply to generate the required weekly sales...

IDC forecasts 4% growth in software spending for 2003.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... Organisations will slowly increase their spending on software in 2003, according to market research company IDC, with software investment rising by around 4% compared with 2002. Between 2002 and 2006, says IDC, revenues for the worldwide...

Services drive growth in enterprise applications.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... The European enterprise applications market has endured a severe slowdown in revenue growth over the past 12 to 18 months, but AMR Research predicts it will buck this trend in the long term. According to AMR, the European enterprise...

Users begin to favour multi-vendor contracts.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... IT vendors need to prepare themselves to fight harder in order to win new sales, according to a survey by market research company Vanson Bourne. Vanson Bourne's survey of 100 IT directors found that in the current economic climate, just...

IT managers fail to meet support expectations.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... There is a huge gap between IT departments' aspirations to deliver the best service possible to users and the actual measures they have in place to achieve this, says a recent survey commissioned by systems and software vendor Hewlett-Packard...

Intel-servers buck the downward trend.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... As businesses have reined in spending on technology, the server hardware market has been badly hit. Analyst group IDC believes the total market for server hardware will decrease by 9% in 2002, compared with 2001. But one area that has and...

Large corporations lack business analytics.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2002... Almost two-thirds of mid- to large-sized US corporations do not have a business analytics solution in place, according to a survey conducted by financial intelligence and accounting software company Coda Group. The survey found that, while...